Professor weighs plusses, minuses of growth in worldwide tourism

By Marshall Swanson

After World War II, tourism boomed worldwide because people, largely in North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia, had more discretionary time and income and they often used it to travel.

Now with the emergence of China and other countries like India on the world stage, another wave of global tourism has begun. Travel industry observers note that last year, there were 840 million international tourists and that by 2020, that number could swell to 1.5 billion.

How that number of travelers can be sustainable, particularly in light of current concerns about global warming and the effect millions of people can have on tourist destinations is what people like David Weaver want to know.

The professor in Carolina's School of Hotel, Restaurant, and Tourism Management is a widely recognized authority in sustainable tourism and ecotourism, both of which promise to get more scrutiny as tourism grows and more places become tourist destinations.

All tourism results in some type of cultural and social impacts to the areas where it occurs, said Weaver, the author of three books on sustainable and ecotourism, "and it's almost impossible to always predict what those impacts might be."

What is known is that almost any kind of tourism can be made more sustainable, meaning that negative environmental, cultural, social, and economic impacts can be kept to a minimum while the benefits are maximized, he said.

"I don't think you can ever have cost-free tourism," Weaver said. "So I always say that sustainable tourism is about minimizing costs while maximizing benefits."

Ecotourism is a subset of sustainable tourism that has three primary characteristics: the imperative to be sustainable, a foundation based on interaction with the natural environment, and a focus on learning and education.

Much of the rhetoric of sustainability and ecotourism relates to community empowerment, questions about who comprises the community, and how benefits are defined, Weaver said. "Within any destination that starts developing tourism you're going to get winners and losers, and people who aren't sure how to think about it."

When people want to develop tourism, said Weaver, they often see it as a blind panacea to local economic problems and they don't think enough about the need to get the right kind of tourism at the right pace of development. "That's what sustainable tourism is," he said.

As a keynote speaker at the 16th-annual Nordic Symposium on Tourism Research in Helsingborg, Sweden last September, Weaver noted the tourism industry appeared to be willing to go only so far in pursuing environmentally and socially friendly policies and practices that relate to sustainability.

He also referred to most tourism consumers as "veneer environmentalists" still not willing to endure the inconvenience or higher prices for truly green products and experiences in tourism. He predicted that until consumers demand more green policies in their tourism experiences the tourism industry will be slow in adopting more sustainable practices.

The tipping point of public concern that could prompt the tourism industry to take a more pro-active sustainable stance could come as the result of an environmentally catastrophic event like Hurricane Katrina, or a critical mass of people following a high profile public advocate for change like Al Gore, Weaver said.

"You need a high profile person who can write a popular book that gets on Oprah and all of a sudden you've got 75 million people who never thought about how travel is important and why it needs to be sustainable," Weaver said.

"At that point you'll begin to move towards a major shift and the industry will respond."

Educators can help by teaching future industry leaders to understand the dilemmas of sustainability so when they become tourism managers they can introduce the concepts from the top and have them percolate down through their organizations.

Academics also can provide more research and information to understand the effects of tourism on the environment and society, encourage an examination of policy changes relating to the use of energy, and promote more innovative thinking in all aspects of the tourism industry, Weaver said.

11/07