Tourism and sustainability

Taleb Rifai is Secretary General of the UNWTO, the United Nations World Tourism Organization. He recently visited Germany and spoke at the opening of this year's ITB Travel Trade Show in the German capital Berlin.

Deutsche Welle: Tourism doesn't seem to be a sector that can be sustainable really, can it? It appeals to a market of mainly wealthy people in the world, and it's all about getting them away from their everyday lives - often taking them to the other side of the world. That implies a lot of transport and a lot of emissions. How do you reconcile this with sustainability?

Taleb Rifai: Allow me to disagree with you on this. Tourism cannot be anything at all if it's not sustainable. The environment is part of the assets of tourism, so to speak.

And I would also disagree with you, if you allow me, on the fact that tourism is an activity of the elite or the rich people - to the contrary. Now we have - even in difficult times in 2009 and 2008 - over 900 million people crossing international borders. Five times as much as that are people traveling within their own countries in what we call "domestic tourism." So the fact is that we have probably every year an average of a trip per human being of this world. Travel and tourism has become a human activity that has become a right of people - the right of people to relax, to travel, to go.

Tourism has become a people's movement; it's no longer an elitist movement with numbers like this.

But if billions of people start acting on this 'right', where does that leave the environment? How can you make tourism sustainable, given the transport implications involved?

This is exactly the challenge - not only in tourism, in every other aspect of life. You cannot stop human activities. You need to make human activities responsible. And we believe that this equation of having people move more and travel more yet consume their environment less is a realistic option, we just have to apply human ingenuity, innovation, technological advancements in trying to deal with this issue.

The fact is that tourism is dependent on this conservation and preservation of sustainability of the environment. If tourism consumes its own assets, it will stop. So it has, as an industry, interests in preservation. People can travel more, but travel with less impact on the environment.

It's really contingent upon a revolution in transportation, isn't it?

Transportation, and also patterns of behaviors at a certain location as well. Transportation is part - it's the major part of it. I'll give you an example: When it comes to climate change, for example, we have established that travel and tourism contributes to five percent of the carbon footprint in the world. This is scientifically now established. Three-quarters of that is from transportation, but there is one-quarter that is also a result of the hospitality industry. The hotels are in that footprint as well.

So yes, it is a majority of transportation, but it's also how we behave where we are, whether we travel or not. And on the transportation part, I think what we need to do is completely revolutionize the way we travel, but the critical part is that we don't take the easy path of saying the way to do it is stop traveling or stop moving. That means, actually, stopping human activity, which is really not an option.

So what do you think about some specific measures - for example, some say air travel is effectively subsidized because there's no tax on aviation fuel. What do you think about putting a tax on aviation fuel?

I don't think that fiscal measures and taxes are the best and most effective way - they are one of the ways of trying to manage and regulate. But eventually, that doesn't really solve the problem. The problem has to be sorted out on a technological level. We have to start moving, and we did.

But how can a technological breakthrough come about as long as the table is skewed toward old technologies - toward unsustainable practices?

Well, it has been. It has been moving in a direction that we have not yet acknowledged or monitored. Planes are much more efficient now than they were 10 years ago, than they were 20 years ago. Of course, there are more people traveling by plane, and that's offsetting this. But the technology itself can lead us into ways of thinking about things that we have never been thinking about before. Innovation is the key for this.

There are plenty of ideas out there, but wouldn't you agree that incentives need to be put in place?

Yes, definitely. Incentives, yes, but taxes are not incentives -

An economist might disagree with that.

They may. What I'm trying to say is that if you give incentives to do the right thing, it's better than to put penalties on those that don't try to do the right thing. You need to make the right mix between the two, but I would be more in favor of giving incentives to those that do the right thing.

Interviewer: Nathan Witkop (arp)
Editor: Rick Demarest