Sustainable Tourism Indicators

European Tourism Indicator System for Sustainable Management of Tourism Destinations

The tourism industry has long based its growth on visitor numbers but these rarely give the full picture. Data like visitor arrivals and room occupancy give a quick snapshot of a resort’s economic health but don’t show the full scope of an industry’s impact on the environment or local communities.

In 2012, the European Commission enlisted INTASAVE, the University of Surrey and Sustainable Travel International to come up with a series of measures that destinations could use to monitor the sustainability of tourism in their area.

The project - officially known as “A Study on the Feasibility of a European Tourism Indicator System for Sustainable Management at Destination Level” - is part of the European Commission’s drive to make the tourism industry more competitive and improve social, environmental and economic sustainability.

The first step in the project was to analyse the pros and cons of existing indicator systems. The lessons learned from this exercise were then fed into the development of a refined set of indicators, with a manual outlining a system to use for their implementation. This system and the revised indicators were then tested at workshops across Europe to see if they would be useful for every type of tourism destination, from ski centres to beach resorts.

The result is the European Tourism Indicator System, a set of, ready-to-use core measures to help all those connected with tourism at a destination build up an accurate picture of what is really going on. So for the first time sectors like waste disposal, utility companies, local planners, business owners, tourist authorities and others can come together to look at this picture and decide together on how they would like it to evolve.

As Malcolm Bell, from Visit Cornwall said: “The European Tourism Indicator System enables destinations to develop the tourism they want, rather than the tourism they end up with.”

The system was officially launched by the European Commission in Brussels in February 2013. Destinations across Europe are now adopting it to feed back into a revision planned for 2015, and the system is expected to continuously evolve.

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European Union Indicators for Sustainable Management at Destination Level
A Europe-wide feasibility study and implementation of a system of indicators and toolkit for national and local stakeholders funded by the European Commission.

 

 

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Culture of Climate Change Index; Temperature Fluctuations for 27 Countries

The Culture of Climate Change Index accounts for a variety of factors and a wide range of data that set a benchmark for 27 countries to see how far each is along the road to sustainability.

Sponsored by the British Council (China), the index is a combination of soft and hard information that incorporates factors as diverse as public awareness and civil society to average surface temperatures and energy consumption.

INTASAVE provided the critical temperature data for each of the countries, spanning the globe from Australia to Sudan to Venezuela. These numbers are essential if the index is to have a solid foundation of climate science evidence on which to base later comparisons.

Using triangulated methodologies, INTASAVE’s researchers calculated and plotted mean average temperature fluctuations across each country over a five-decade period. It was a vast task that revealed significant variations in temperature in all but one of the countries over the study period.

Numbers are not solutions but they serve as important guides for measuring a country’s impact on the environment. The data provided and index, as a combined analysis, can also give impetus to action and point to models that other countries might follow to improve sustainability.

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