By Javier Picazo Feliu
Madrid, Mar 28 (EFE).- The year 2024 is expected to mark the recovery of tourism after the Covid-19 pandemic and faces notable challenges: offering greater sustainability at the same cost, avoiding massive concentration of visitors at a time and catering to increasingly “green” and demanding tourists, according to UN Tourism Executive Director Zoritsa Urosevic.
In an interview with EFE, the official, also responsible for the Sustainability and Resilience wing of the UN agency, stressed on things the sector has learned post-pandemic, underlining the tourists “are much more demanding on places which are more reflecting responsible practices.”
In this regard, Urosevic considered that as a “broad ecosystem,” it was very important to understand that sustainability “integrates and includes many different types of economic and human activities.”
In promoting sustainable tourism, the executive director said the key will be achieving social balance and increasing the economic income from tourism, vital for countries in economic terms as well as local employment and development.
Measures to make tourism more sustainable include using as few forms of transport as possible during a holiday, extending the duration of stays by offering more and better entertainment alternatives and deseasonalizing the arrival of visitors beyond the summer to avoid crowded destinations with inflated prices.
“The seasonality has expanded (…) and a timespan that is broader. So basically, what you can see is that even in hotel occupancy, this is reflected. People are traveling from May to October November to beach destinations which before were less common,” Urosevic said.
“I think that is an opportunity to actually increase the percentage in occupied occupancy for hospitality, but as well reduce the stress on the environment, on nature and on the economic burdens that this can bring. So that is something that I think we should take advantage of,” she added.
Tourism also makes local people benefit from investments in the country, such as connectivity and transport, in a sector that generates 1 out of 10 jobs in the world and contributes about three percent to the GDP, according to the UN tourism official.
This year is expected to mark the sector’s total recovery after the coronavirus crisis, after international tourism in 2023 reached 88 percent of pre-pandemic levels, with an estimated 1.3 billion international arrivals, according to data from the United Nations agency.
“We need to balance between access and value added for or the I can say the society that lives in that place,” without forgetting that it is a sector that consumes natural resources, generates waste and affects climate change, something that Urosevic believes is a common problem that must be addressed with caution.
Moreover, she stressed on the challenge of global warming and how it posed a problem to everyone.
In this regard, the Glasgow Declaration was signed by nearly 850 organizations with the aim of “rebalancing” the relationship of tourism with nature, which seeks to halve emissions by 2030 and reach net zero emissions by 2050.
“Because resource efficiency requires investment, new renewable energies, you need to be either to have the government or to have a destination or region to invest in renewable energy resource efficiency technologies as well,” she said, especially emphasizing on the importance of water.
“We know in those places, water is very scarce. We don’t speak about water, but water is very scarce. And water is very expensive to produce,” said Urosevic. “And I think that it is quite a complex parodying between energy water and waste management as well as pollution.”
According to data managed by UN Tourism and the International Transport Forum , CO2 emissions from tourism grew by at least 60 percent between 2005 and 2016, with transport responsible for five percent of global CO2 emissions.
Measuring the levels of sustainability of tourism in each country is an important step, with measures expected to be discussed by member countries in mid-April during the Sustainability Week at the UN General Assembly in New York and with which they hope to analyze their economic, social and environmental impact.
“It is always very difficult to find the midway between economic growth and societal equilibrium. And that is really going to be very much depending on the authorities on the governance, but this is as well a participatory process. So if you want to create jobs and livelihoods you need visitors, if you don’t have visitors, you have no jobs,” she said. EFE
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