For many people, travelling is one of life’s great pleasures. As the travel writer Bill Bryson puts it: “The greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.”

This helps explain why, by 2020, three times as many people will travel as they do today; that’s 1.6 billion people. At the same time, air prices are plummeting. As one respondent commented on the ESRC project Promoting Sustainable Travel: “All of a sudden, flights are so cheap. It’s actually cheaper for me to get that flight, go to Poland and spend a week there than to go to Cornwall or visit friends in Edinburgh.”

But is our love affair with travel and with tourism going to cost us the earth? It is widely recognised that the way we travel has implications for the environment and its sustainability. What we take from our travels might be just that – taking as opposed to giving back, a selfish one-way relationship that benefits only the traveller.

Tricia Barnett of the charity Tourism Concern summed up the impact of tourism, conservation and human livelihoods in the Independent. “The slogan for the most environmentally friendly travelling used to be: ‘Take nothing but photographs, leave nothing but footprints’. How times have changed. The footprint we now talk about is a human rights footprint. It includes the environment, the economy and the social and cultural impacts of tourism.”

So how can we prevent our trips turning into guilt trips? A series of ESRC-funded seminars hosted by three universities and other ESRC-funded research projects are looking at the key
issues of tourism and sustainability in a bid to inform current thinking.

Read the rest of this article at http://www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk/ESRCInfoCentre/Images/societynow4_tcm6-32764.pdf and let me know what you think?

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Let's move on from 'sustainable' tourism to 'good' tourism - which ALL tourism should be (another thread is discussing this). We need to understand how to make tourism 'good'.
All tourism should be resilient - able to withstand or absorb change. Through my work in Asia (leading tours, community development, consultancy and research) I've realised the key factors in resilience are:
1) understanding & harnessing market forces
2) strong stakeholder networks
3) strong leadership within a strong institutional framework.
These factors must work within a context of learning, adaptability and flexibility.
We can think of this as the 'Sphere of Tourism Resilience'. Knowing these are the important factors means we can advise, plan and implement effective interventions.
These findings have come partly out of research into tourism revival after the tsunami in Sri Lanka and Thailand - I'd gladly share these with interested parties. I'd also welcome your comments!
Best regards
Janet

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