Review and evaluation of existing international systems of tourism sustainability indicators

Abstract

Kontinuiranim praćenjem održivosti stvara se potrebna informacijska osnova za učinkovito upravljanje razvojem turizma u željenom, održivom smjeru. Kako je održivost postala ključni izazov u razvoju kvalitetnih turističkih proizvoda, prije tridesetak godina počeli su se pojavljivati različiti sustavi pokazatelja održivosti. Okvir Svjetske turističke organizacije za procjenu održivosti zajedno sa sustavom ETIS Europske komisije prepoznaje se kao najvažniji i najutjecajniji, dok postoji velik broj novih sustava pokazatelja i skupova koji se uglavnom temelje na njihovu iskustvu. Međutim, unatoč postojećim sustavima dolazi do zabune jer se broj mogućih sustava, a time i broj pokazatelja, stalno povećava, bez jasno definirana okvira i obveze mjerenja. Obilje sustava, inicijativa i u konačnici projekata stvaraju zabludu i nemaju stvaran doprinos osnovnom znanju o stanju održivosti u destinaciji.

Life Cycle-Based Sustainability and Circularity Indicators for the Tourism Industry: A Literature Review

“…For literature review "A", 21 results were found. After the inclusion/exclusion criteria were taken into account, 8 articles [8][9][10][40][41][42][43][44] were selected. All of them are quite recent: one is from 2007 whilst the rest are from 2014 onwards, and half of them are from 2020.…”

“…In contrast, when it comes to sustainability indicators in general, the meta-review showed a plethora of publications that have tackled this issue hitherto as well as several international frameworks, systems and mechanisms [13][14][15][16][17]. In terms of specific foci within the tourism industry, the analysed reviews [8][9][10][40][41][42][43][44] focused in general on tourism; three of them explicitly focused on the destination level [9,40,43], whilst none of them specifically tackled the hospitality subsector. Another significant finding for the main objective of this article was that none of these reviews mentioned whether the identified or proposed sets of indicators could be considered as life cycle-related.…”

“…In fact, some of the reviews did not provide indicators at all but rather a thorough discussion on them [41,42,44]; for this reason, they were considered in the analysis as a contribution to the discussion. On the other hand, three of them explicitly considered the three pillars of sustainability separately, therefore providing environmental, economic and social indicators [8][9][10], whilst Marković Vukadin et al [9] provided social along with cultural ones. Finally, two reviews [40,43] provided sustainability indicators, without clearly citing any of the pillars.…”

“…Indicators such as "production of energy from renewable sources" [10], "waste generated" [40] and "expenditure per tourist night" [43] are examples of more specific indicators, whilst "reducing impact", "visitor fulfilment" [8] and "clean food and tourism" [43] can be seen as more generic, qualitative in some cases, indicators to assess sustainability. In most cases, sustainability indicators refer to energy/resource efficiency [8][9][10]40], waste generation [9,10,40] and water consumption and/or quality [9,10,40] for the environmental pillar. Regarding the economic one, indicators related to expenditures per tourist [10,43] and occupancy rate of accommodations/net tourism receipts [10,43] were mentioned more frequently.…”

“…Such tools may also be vital for monitoring sectoral development in order to enable the assessment of tourism policies and practices for measuring sectoral progress and developing suitable strategies for a better future. They can also be used for transferring knowledge through the production of quantitative and objective data that can deliver a richer understanding of tourism-related phenomena [9]. These may include indicators and indices [10] which usually focus more on the main area where the visiting trip takes place (destination level) rather than on a single accommodation (hospitality level) and comprise positive effects (typically economic ones) and negative effects (typically social and environmental ones) [11].…”