What is Regenerative and Sustainable Tourism?
I get asked what regenerative tourism is a lot. I’m not surprised given how newly popular the idea is to the world of tourism. In my previous blog, I summed up regenerative tourism as follows:
sustainable tourism + corporate social responsibility (CSR) = regenerative tourism
Sustainable Tourism: Doing Less Harm
The United Nations World Tourism Organization defines sustainable tourism as “tourism that takes full account of its current and future economic, social and environmental impacts, addressing the needs of visitors, the industry, the environment and host communities.” Despite this, I often see “sustainability” referenced only in the context of conserving the environment. Social sustainability is often completely forgotten or framed as a positive visitor experience, rather than focusing on the health of host communities. For a regenerative approach to tourism, host communities and their needs are centered alongside the need for environmental protection.
Rethinking How We Travel
Next question about definitions: How does ecotourism fit into regenerative tourism? Adventure tourism? Mass tourism? Cultural tourism? What about Dark Tourist on Netflix –how does that fit in? There is a type of tourism for everything under the sun these days. Among the more niche are medical tourism (traveling for medical procedures), slum tourism (visiting slums), and space tourism (yes, going into space). And while you might not recognize the following words, you will likely recognize the activities around which they revolve: avitourism (birding), architourism (architecture), voluntourism (volunteering), and agritourism (agriculture). How does regenerative tourism fit into all this vocabulary?
Regenerative Tourism: Healing the Planet Through Travel
I think of tourism as having two levels: a type of approach and a type of tourism experience. Here’s what I mean:
Think of a spectrum of sustainability. On one end of the spectrum, you have minimal consideration of sustainability principles. Think lots of people, lots of infrastructure, no climate change offsetting, no green design, little or no renewable energy, lots of long-haul travel to visit the destination, lots of waste produced, angry locals resentful of visitors, little money being invested back into the host communities. This is a typical approach to mass tourism with little thought for environmental and social impacts and a lot of emphasis placed on economic returns and the visitor experience above all else.
Now consider a more sustainable approach to tourism that balances environmental, social, and economic benefits to the destination. This is where things get a little confusing in my mind. It’s easy to conjure images of mass tourism with thousands of people visiting well-known places, like Disney World, the Louvre, or the Great Wall of China. It can be a little more challenging to think of tourism experiences that embody more sustainable practices. Often, safaris or rustic campgrounds or backpacking come to mind because they involve animals, nature, and little infrastructure.
If you think back to your spectrum of sustainability, regenerative approaches encompass sustainability but have the added element of CSR. Tourism can be sustainable without being regenerative, but tourism that’s regenerative is also inherently sustainable. Including CSR in the definition of regenerative tourism centers the question: What can tourism do for the destination? This includes how tourism can help boost the economy, support social development projects, and provide resources to protect the environment. The idea that tourism can have a net positive impact is harder to imagine when mass tourism images are what immediately come to mind. One of the reasons why mass tourism sites exist is because they are well advertised and well known, and therefore come more easily to your mind when you think about tourism.
The Future of Travel: A Shift Towards Regeneration
The truth is, most types of tourism experiences can be regenerative, sustainable, or unsustainable depending on their approach. Here’s an example: Nature-based tourism relies on natural attractions to bring visitors to the area. Activities commonly include hiking, walking, birdwatching, sightseeing in nature areas, photography, and visiting places like national or state parks. My first mental image is me, alone on a trail, observing wildlife and taking in the scenic vistas in a nearby protected area. Then I reflect on the reality of some of my more recent experiences: trouble finding parking, loud groups of hikers ahead of and behind me on the trail, overflowing trash cans, people trampling vegetation to get off trail for that perfect photograph, dog excrement in bags left trailside, and milling about with a huge crowd of people when you reach the mountain summit. These are all common overcrowding issues being faced by national parks in the US and illustrate that, while we may think of visiting “nature” as sustainable, that is not always the case.
And “rustic” doesn’t necessarily equate with sustainable, just like “luxury” doesn’t equate with unsustainable. Sure, a backcountry camping site is rustic and probably fairly sustainable. That might in part be because there’s no infrastructure and fewer people are willing to haul their camping equipment to the site than stay in a hotel. Low numbers often help with being sustainable, just like the numbers associated with mass tourism require much more planning for and investment in sustainability and CSR to offset the impacts. But some luxury hotels also have impressive sustainability and regenerative initiatives. These facilities invest in renewable energy, sustainable supply chains, water conservation technology, and local initiatives to benefit the environment and host communities.
At the end of the day, the approach to tourism determines if the experience is regenerative, sustainable, or unsustainable. These three approaches can be found in almost any type of tourism experience whether it’s luxury or rustic, nature-based or not. Some of the shared criteria that can define regenerative capacity relate to the number of visitors (and where they’re traveling from), the size and location of the destination, the amount of infrastructure needed to support visitation, and the willpower to adopt sustainable, ethical, and socially responsible principles.
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Written by Lydia Horne
