Box 25B Measuring sustainable tourism: the need for better indicators

The total number of international arrivals at frontiers provides an impression of the overall tourist intensity in a given country, or group of countries, but this statistic is not specifically related to the environment. Arrivals statistics can also be useful because they are disaggregated by mode of transport. Number of overnight stays at accommodation establishments is probably the best existing indicator of local environmental pressure (ie, more useful than arrivals at accommodation establishments), although in many settings environmental impacts are associated with day visitors. However, all these indicators can at best be considered background indicators. Effective indicators of the real environmental impact of tourism and recreation should aim to provide measures which are exclusively related to physical and socio-cultural pressures from these activities. In practice the impacts of residents and other economic activities are difficult to separate from those of tourists. In addition, impacts are complex, cumulative and mostly site specific. Thus it has proved difficult to define even a few key, internationally comparable indicators. Environmentally relevant tourism data collected so far have tended to be on a localised case study basis (eg, those described in the national reports submitted to UNCED).

Indicators to monitor sustainable travel and tourism development are under consideration by organisations such as WTO, the World Tourism and Travel Environment Research Centre (WTTERC) and the European Commission (Eurostat). The WTO are developing measures at three levels: composite indices (eg, destination attractivity and site stress indices), national level indicators (eg, percentage of national area protected, endangered species), and site or destination specific indicators (eg, development density, area per tourist, or energy consumption per visitor-day). These types of indicators and indices should be determined by the needs of tourism sector managers, and hence reflect concerns such as the environmental, psychological or social carrying capacity of an area, the dependence on and control over tourism by local communities and the local or regional capacity for managing tourism impacts (eg, whether local tourism management plans are in place).

The WTO is now planning to test these indicators and indices on a voluntary basis in countries of different sizes, levels of development and tourism types. In this chapter, existing tourism statistics are used to make quantitative international comparisons, while case studies present more environmentally relevant data.

Source: WTO, 1993b