A sustainable tourism NGO has launched a campaign at this year’s WTTC Global Summit to better the lives of 10 million people through take-up of a sustainability Impact Monitoring System.
Sustainable Travel International unveiled its ’10 Million Better’ campaign at the pre-summit Tourism for Tomorrow Symposium yesterday.
The symposium was attended by the judges of the Tourism for Tomorrow Awards and representatives of the 15 finalists.
A New York-based non-governmental organisation, Sustainable Travel International will make the monitoring system available to destinations and businesses as an open-source tool to assess and report progress on sustainability.
It suggests the system, designed to track and report on a variety of social, environmental, cultural and economic indicators, is unique and will monitor the growth of income and opportunity for local people as well as protection of natural, cultural and heritage sites.
Chief executive Louise Twining-Ward said: “A big shift is needed towards more sustainable production and consumption patterns. There is a new readiness and urgency to act.
“The time is now for the industry to focus its enormous economic power on solid goals and metrics for improving lives.”
She told the Tourism for Tomorrow finalists and judges: “We are still not collaborating enough. Tourism’s use of resources is going to double by 2030.
“So many people are not benefiting sufficiently from tourism – crafts people, tour guides, taxi drivers, sanitation workers.
“There are lots of opportunities to do things better and to take things to scale.”
Campaign ambassador and Carlson Rezidor vice-president for responsible business Inge Huijbrechts said: “This is about shifting the conversation from sustainable tourism to good tourism.
“It is about creating shared values and partnerships in destinations. Only that way can we mitigate the social and environmental risks.”
Sustainable Travel International founder Brian Mullis told the symposium: “We can’t improve lives if the environment is degraded.”
Nick Desolino, a member of Sustainable Travel International’s board and an energy and sustainability advisor at consultancy KPMG in the UK, said in a statement: “Organisations need to graduate from simply reporting their investments in sustainable practices to tracking their actual impacts.
“But they need objective tools to quantify and report on them.”