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How Do You Measure Green Tourism?

By James Kanter

How much tourism can a delicate landscape — or globe — sustain? Kayakers in Baja California, Mexico.

BARCELONA — The next time you see cranes and bulldozers at a congested airport, consider the following: There will be 1.6 billion tourists traveling the globe by the end of the next decade. That is nearly twice as many than at present – and it could have a profound impact on heavily visited parts of the globe.

Promoting more sustainable forms of tourism is going to be particularly important in the developing world, said Mr. Steiner. But he underlined that tourism often was the important source of income for developing countries.

On Monday, Mr. Frangialli’s organization joined with Travelocity, the Rainforest Alliance and Ted Turner, the chairman of the United Nations Foundation, to announce efforts to draft voluntary standards to guide travellers through an increasingly confusing range of “green” travel options.

There are currently about 130 different certification systems for “green” travel, said Erika Harms, the executive director for sustainable development at the U.N. Foundation. Even then, only a small number of the roughly 100,000 hotels and resorts around the world claim to abide by any of those sustainability standards, said Jeffrey Glueck, the chief market officer for Travelocity.

The initiative launched Monday aims to make it easier for customers to find reliable and trustworthy information about the practices of hotels and resorts during the process of booking a room on the Internet. The initiative proposes Global Sustainable Tourism Criteria that would focus on four areas: ensuring benefits flow to local communities, reducing damage to heritage sites, lessening harm to the environment, and making projects sustainable.

“Consumers deserve widely accepted standards to distinguish green from green washed,” said Mr. Glueck.

Mr. Steiner said he hoped the standard would become “the reference point from which many others can work.” He said “it should become as easy in the near future to go on the Internet and be able to choose a holiday or a carrier that actually takes responsibility for their environmental footprint.”

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