The proliferation of accreditation schemes for sustainable tourism has led to confusion and a lack of credibility. Slowly, international bodies are making moves to simplify and unify a vast, diverse field
If tourism can help alleviate poverty and advance developing economies, fulfilling that potential depends greatly on the choices made by tourists.
Sustainable tourism certificate programmes should help. The certificates can act as an educational, credible tool to inform tourists about their sustainable options when travelling. Ideally, certificate schemes would make travelling responsibly easier for tourists and so encourage tourists to support sustainable tourism.
“Certification plays an important role in driving up standards, informing customers and aiding decision making, plus allowing more responsible companies to benefit,” says Georgina Davies, public relations manager for the Travel Foundation, a charity that works to enhance sustainability within the travel and tourism industry.
Yet the sustainable tourism certificate programmes that exist today lack the necessary consistency and credibility to fully achieve these aims.
More than 100 certificate programmes operate around the world, all with the aim of evaluating and accrediting the sustainable measures taken by tourism businesses. Most programmes involve requirements rooted in the reduction of environmental impact and/or support of the surrounding communities socially and economically, yet each programme uses its own set of standards.
Little trust in labels
Consumers repeatedly say they want sustainable labels in the travel industry to help guide them in their decisions, according to Janice Lichtenwalt, communications director of the Global Sustainable Tourism Council (GSTC). However, they also say they don’t trust what they are seeing now. “There are 100-plus different sustainable travel certification programmes in the world with nearly as many scales of ‘greenness’,” she says.
Currently, some certificate programmes cater to tourism in specific regions in the world, such as the certification for sustainable tourism programme managed by the Costa Rican Tourism Board. Others focus on promoting only one type of sustainability in tourism, such as the luxury eco certification standard offered by Sustainable Travel International.
And each sustainable tourism certification programme implements its own method of auditing participating tourism businesses.
“Some programmes are voluntary and offer no independent auditing while others are very strict and require great commitment from a business in order to be certified. Consumers believe greenwashing is occurring in the marketplace, and they are right,” Lichtenwalt says.
Poor recognition
Certification programmes are plagued by little market recognition and poor coordination, according to Ronald Sanabria, vice-president of sustainable tourism for Rainforest Alliance, an NGO that offers certification to sustainable tourism businesses.
As it stands, tourists are left to compare certification labels ranging from the Foundation of Environmental Education’s Green Key to Rainforest Alliance’s little green frog in order to determine which international tourism businesses are managed sustainably and which are not.
Seeking to address some of these issues, a small number of umbrella organisations have striven to create governing criteria for sustainable and eco labelling.
For example, the Voluntary Initiatives for Sustainability in Tourism (Visit), led by the European Centre for Ecological and Agricultural Tourism and European NGO network Ecotrans, has established a common standard for eco-labels for tourism businesses in Europe.
But for now, the GSTC’s accreditation programme seems to be at the forefront of sustainable tourism accreditation initiatives.
“To date, GSTC’s programme is the only initiative in place to establish an accreditation process for certification programmes for ecotourism and sustainable tourism,” says Ayako Ezaki, director of communications at the International Ecotourism Society.
Lichtenwalt agrees, saying: “[The GSTC programme] brings all sustainable travel standards into alignment at the most basic, minimum level … The consumer can trust that a programme using a GSTC accredited standard meets the basic minimums of sustainable travel.”
The detailed criteria are based on the overall themes of effective sustainable planning, maximising social and economic benefits to the local community, enhancing cultural heritage, and reducing negative impacts to the environment.
The criteria are designed to establish only the basic standards shared by all sustainable tourism certificates and therefore still allow certification programmes to “differentiate themselves either on a regional or local level with additional criteria that help businesses meet the needs of the local community and environment or in some other way”, says Lichtenwalt.
But while the GSTC’s accreditation programme glimmers with promise, the programme’s real effectiveness, most notably in bringing credibility to certificates, has yet to be established.
And there remains the risk that it will be seen merely as yet another certification scheme. For now, tourists still need to do plenty of their own research to be certain of the responsible travel options.