What is Sustainable Tourism?

What is sustainable tourism?

All forms of tourism touch the environment in which it takes place. The effects of this contact between tourism and its environment may be positive or negative, and they may be strong or weak. Everyone involved in tourism have a responsibility to make sure that their activity does not have too many strong, negative effects on the places that are visited. A certain amount of negative effects may be acceptable as they may be compensated for by strong, positive effects. If the costs of tourism to a place consistently outweighs the benefits, however, then tourism to this place is not sustainable in the long run.

Sustainable tourism may thus be defined as:

Definition 1: Tourism that in the long term has more positive than negative effects on the environment.

It should be emphasized that the term environment above refers not only to the natural environment, but also to the cultural, social and economic environments. When determining how tourism is impacting the environment it is common to use a so-called PSE-analysis where the letters PSE stand for:

• Physical Impacts: Effects on the natural and cultural environment.
• Social Impacts: Effects on the social environment.
• Economic Impacts: Effects on the economic environment.

Although the focus is usually on how tourism is impacting destinations, this analysis should also include the effects tourism has on transit regions as well as tourism generating (home) areas.

The first use of the term sustainability as a measure of human activity is usually credited the UN report Our Common Future from 1987. In this report, sustainable development was defined as "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." Inserting the word tourism into this definition gives us a good, alternative definition of sustainable tourism:

Definition 2: Tourism that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

The needs referred to here include the needs of both organizations and individuals and both visitors and locals. Responsible tourists and tourism companies must therefore behave and operate in a way that does not endanger the chances of future generations of tourists and tourism companies to continue exploring and experiencing a healthy and prosperous planet.