Talk:Sustainable tourism

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Edits to Responsible Tourism Section
Hello fellow Wikipeidans I am planning on making some additions and edits to the section under Responsible Tourism. Feel free to question or edit my changes. I propose to remove some of the information regarding private companies that offer responsible tourism as the promotion of companies is not allowed on Wikipedia. Thank you!Mcrussell11 (talk) 21:59, 16 April 2019 (UTC)

Proposal to remove outdated, essay-like material
I think this section is not adding value and it should be removed. It reads like an outdated essay:

Confusion surrounding Governmental Management of Sustainable Tourism
There has been some discussion regarding the toll of inter-governmental organizations and the development of sustainable tourism practices in the third world. In Mowforth and Munt's book 'Tourism and Sustainability: New Tourism in the Third World, they criticized a document that was written by the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC), the World Tourism Organisation, and the Earth Council, which was included in Agenda 21. It was entitled 'Agenda 21 for the Travel and Tourism Industry: Towards Environmentally Sustainable Development'. Mowforth and Munt commented on the language used to describe the environment and local culture in such documents because the preservation of the environment and local culture are the two main objectives when practicing sustainable tourism. They pointed out that some of the keywords used were 'core asset', 'core product', 'product quality' and 'preserve'. They argued that the treatment of the environment as a marketable product was clear and that such documents provide a good list of advice for Third World governments regarding sustainable tourism but do not provide the resources to incorporate them into the development of their tourism industries.

It is arguments such as these that postulate that there is a gap between the advice given by non-governmental or inter-governmental organizations to Third World governments and what can actually be brought to realization. These arguments try and persuade readers that documents like the one released by the WTTC that the development of sustainable tourism actually 'bypasses the interests of local people'.

EMsmile (talk) 03:51, 3 June 2021 (UTC)

Another bit of essay like material which I think we ought to remove
I am proposing to also remove this textblock for being essay-like, poor sourced and a bit off-topic:

Responsible hospitality
While Friedman (1962) famously argued that, admittedly within legal parameters, the sole responsibility of business was to generate profit for shareholders the idea that businesses’ responsibility extends beyond this has existed for decades and is most frequently encountered in the concept of corporate social responsibility. There are numerous ways businesses can and do engage in activities that are not intended to benefit shareholders and management, at least not in the short term. However, often acts of corporate social responsibility are undertaken because of the perceived benefit to business. Usually in hospitality this relates to the cost reductions associated with improved energy efficiency but may also relate to, for example, the rise in ethical consumerism and the view that being seen to be a responsible business is beneficial to revenue growth.

As per the Cape Town Declaration on Responsible Tourism, responsible hospitality is culturally sensitive. Instead of then calling for the unachievable, responsible hospitality simply makes the case for more responsible forms of hospitality, hospitality that benefits locals first, and visitors second. Certainly, all forms of hospitality can be improved and managed so that negative impacts are minimized whilst striving for maximization of positive impacts on the environment. EMsmile (talk) 04:36, 3 June 2021 (UTC)

Restructuring and revision work done (June to Sept 2021)
I have just completed some restructuring work on this article. I have tried to use standard headings like Definitions, challenges, solutions, ... - so I have moved text blocks around a bit. Along the way I found a lot of outdated, poorly sourced or essay like material (see above) which I either improved or removed. The article was using a surprisingly old-fashioned language (e.g. First World, Third World) and some very old references. I guess it was set up a long time ago. We need to be careful to avoid overlap with impacts of tourism. - I also plan to contact some content experts to help with reviewing and updating this article. This is part of this project that I am working on. Does anyone have suggestions for suitable experts that I could contact? I am thinking mainly textbook authors, people who like to teach and share knowledge. EMsmile (talk) 04:42, 3 June 2021 (UTC)
 * P.S. There are a lot of textbooks on "sustainable tourism" around. I plan to contact some of those authors. EMsmile (talk) 05:48, 3 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Update: I have now received some reviewer's comments by David Fennell (book author) in a Word document which I and User:PlanetCare plan to weave into the article over the coming days/weeks (we have already started with this now). EMsmile (talk) 14:10, 22 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Inputs from sustainable tourism experts such as Fennell and Mahalic suggest that we cannot exactly equate Sustainable tourism with Responsible tourism so I'm going to take out the "or responsible tourism" from the first sentence. I will make some adjustments to the "Definitions and concepts" section--the first section after the lead--to make the distinctions more clear. This section right now has zero citations, and I have not been able to find anything to back up the long-ish list of things of Responsible Tourists can do, and so plan to modify it so I can use a source to define "responsible tourism" and take out the list of practices. This will keep the section focused on just Definitions and Concepts.PlanetCare (talk) 15:13, 27 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks for that, great work. There are two more areas of work which I think we should tackle:


 * 1) I see a lot of overlap between the section on "environmental impacts" and Impacts of tourism. I think we move our content to there and then replace with an excerpt? In any case we shouldn't duplicate what is in the other article.
 * Update on 1 Sept: I have reworked this section a bit to reduce the overlap. EMsmile (talk) 02:57, 1 September 2021 (UTC)


 * 1) Regarding the SDG targets, it would be good if we could dig up some numbers on where we stand with the indicators. So far, I haven't found anything. See this website where it says: "We are currently not aware of data for this indicator.". The UN World Tourism Organization is the custodian agency for those indicators, they must have put out a report by now? The High Level Political Forum report for 2021 provides this information which we could perhaps pick some key figures from (then again, it doesn't really say anything about sustainable tourism, only tourism in general): 99. Global GDP from tourism increased at a higher rate than the rest of the economy over the decade preceding 2019 to account for 4.1 per cent of global GDP in 2019, compared to 3.7 per cent in 2008. However, as one of the sectors hardest hit by the pandemic, a reversal in this trend is expected for 2020 and the coming years. Globally, international arrivals decreased by 74 per cent in 2020 compared to 2019, which represents a loss of $1.3 trillion in inbound tourism expenditure, more than 11 times the loss resulting from the 2009 global crisis. An estimated 100 to 120 million tourism jobs are at risk because of the pandemic, with a disproportionate effect on women. While the tourism sectors of virtually all countries and territories in the world are affected, the small island developing States suffer most acutely. EMsmile (talk) 13:23, 30 August 2021 (UTC)

More images needed
I 've been working with the text and citations for Sustainable tourism, and have run out of steam but wanted to flag for others the opportunity for making this article better with a few more images. Maybe: Mass tourism photo of too many people crowded into one place. Rural tourism photo of a few people working on an organic farm. I would also like to see the "sea shells" one replaced. Maybe initials carved into trees on National Park land, so the "damage" of tourism is highlighted? The sea shells are still on the beach so it doesn't make the point very well, that it's not good to take seas shells from the beach.PlanetCare (talk) 17:00, 28 August 2021 (UTC)
 * I've done a bit of work on the images. I agreed with you about the sea shells images and have removed it. I looked in Wikimedia Commons for images with the search terms "sustainable tourism" and "responsible tourism". I picked out a few that I thought might work. Please check. Of course it would be easy to add the standard "eco resort" photos but I felt this would narrow the focus down too much, or? I found many photos from several conferences but most of the photos from panel discussions or presentations I didn't find useful either. I thought the ones from India were pretty good. I hesitate to include photos that are the opposite of sustainable tourism but did add one for "mass tourism". Although having lots of people visiting the sights in Rome may not be unsustainable if they all got there by train or from not far away (?). The most sustainable tourism is the one where we all stay close to our homes (?).EMsmile (talk) 13:15, 30 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Thank you EMsmile for investing the time in improving the images. Starting with the Kakum walking bridge was excellent. I thought you made good choices, with good rationale for the other you picked. So:  good by me.  One additional thought, though. Keeping the clipper ship was good, but could we add to the caption the number of people it accommodates, vs the usual number of people a major cruise ship accommodates?PlanetCare (talk) 11:49, 1 September 2021 (UTC)
 * that was not me but User:sadads. But I agree with you, it was a good change. I have made the caption of the sail boat more precise but I don't know anything about number of people. Furthermore, I don't think that number of people would be an indicator whether it's sustainable or not. I guess one would have to look at energy requirements per person, but the transport energy is just one factor. That's also why I changed around how we mentioned mass tourism. I don't see mass tourism as the opposite of sustainable tourism. If a big group of people gets on a train and visits the sights of their nearest town, then that's probably more sustainable than a small group of people who jumps on a plane and flies to a fancy 5-star ecoresort in a far away country. So the "mass" in itself it not necessarily less sustainable. EMsmile (talk) 13:45, 1 September 2021 (UTC)

All good points. Agreed. Sadads Thanks. 100.17.20.218 (talk) 15:07, 1 September 2021 (UTC)

Edits to definition section
I did some work on the "Definitions and Concepts" section to clear it up and make it less essay-like. More focused on definitions. See what you think.PlanetCare (talk) 16:55, 28 August 2021 (UTC)
 * To all: should the definitions be listed in alphabetic order? I don't have a clear rationale for the order in which definitions and concepts are presented, except that I didn't like beginning with "sustainable tourism" but instead wanted to put that into the context of tourism in general.  I added in a definition of Ecotourism. Thoughts?PlanetCare (talk) 11:42, 1 September 2021 (UTC)
 * I have re-arranged it a bit. My thinking is that we should make it clear what are "related similar concepts" and which ones are not. I merged the mass tourism back with the tourism, as I don't think it needed a separate heading. For eco-tourism I moved your new definition to ecotourism and then replaced it with an excerpt. This way, we have improved two articles together, not just one. I am a big fan of excerpts for efficiency purposes. Overall, I think it would be good if we could clearly explain in which sense those related concepts are similar but distinct. E.g. sustainable tourism is broader than ecotourism, isn't it? Does that come out clearly so far? EMsmile (talk) 13:48, 1 September 2021 (UTC)

Interlinking with the article impacts of tourism?
There is an article called impacts of tourism which is closely related. We should make sure our article fits together neatly with the other one like a puzzle piece. Minimising the negative impacts of tourism (and maximising the positive impacts) equals sustainable tourism, right? So my idea would be to re-arrange impacts of tourism to show more clearly the negative impacts separately from the positive impacts. Then we could link from here to the "negative impacts of tourism" and use some of the examples that are included here, rather than reinventing the wheel and add new examples from scratch. Probably also the article impacts of tourism does not yet properly mention "sustainable tourism". Note that the article impacts of tourism gets about 450 pageviews per day, whereas sustainable tourism only gets about 250 pageviews per day. The article on tourism gets currently 2000 pageviews per day.EMsmile (talk) 13:55, 1 September 2021 (UTC)
 * I've done some work on this now, moved some content to impacts of tourism. EMsmile (talk) 15:06, 26 May 2022 (UTC)

Reduce space taken up by economics sidebar?
I find that the green economics sidebar (see on the right) takes up way too much space and is distracting. Does anyone know how to change it so that the content of the sub-heading get collapsed? Do we even really need this sidebar? EMsmile (talk) 13:57, 1 September 2021 (UTC)
 * My preference would be to delete the whole thing. It's more confusing than informational.PlanetCare (talk) 14:27, 3 September 2021 (UTC)
 * OK, I have taken out the sidebar now. If someone knows how to make it more collapsed and compact then I guess it could go back in. I also wrote on the talk page of the sidebar's template but no reply yet. EMsmile (talk) 09:55, 6 September 2021 (UTC)

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