Key challenges
The number of sustainable tourism initiatives has grown steadily over the past years. Yet, the overall impact of these has not always proved to be as effective and beneficial as anticipated.
Sustainable tourism is still a young niche market. There are a number of challenges in the implementation of ecotourism and sustainable initiatives, such as transportation and climate Change, tourism standards and marketing.
Tourism and climate change
Even if tourism initiatives are linked up with the objectives of sustainable development, the negative impacts of travel remain unresolved. The transport industry, particularly air travel, has a number of negative effects, including noise pollution, hazardous waste around terminals and climate-altering effects of burning hydrocarbons. Tourism has an obligation to minimise its impacts in terms of the emission of greenhouse gases, not least because changes to the world's climate will have a direct impact on many tourism destinations which could have far reaching implications, both for the tourism industry but also for other economic sectors. Recommended reading...Tourism Standards
Within the sector of responsible tourism, a number of standards have developed over recent years, almost all of them voluntary in nature. Such standards range from codes of conduct, to benchmarking and reporting schemes to certification and award schemes in the tourism sector, and each one of them varies in the effectiveness of their means of verification and enforcement. Initially most of the standards and certification schemes concerned themselves predominantly with environmental performance, but more recently social performance and poverty reduction have also been included in tourism standards and certification.Generally the introduction of such standards should be welcomed. In order for standards to have a positive effect on sustainable development, however, standards should explicitly address poverty reduction and be widely applied. Concerns have also been raised that in efforts to standardise operations, most certification programmes contradict one of the main components of ecotourism - local control. In that sense standards and certification programmes should not only give attention to environmental and economic concerns but also to indigenous and local concerns. Recommended reading...
