Tourism 2023 – creating a sustainable tourism industry
The Tourism 2023 project sets out to help the UK outbound travel and tourism industry understand the challenges it faces and plan for a sustainable future.
Climate change, population growth, shortages of oil and other resources will have dramatic impacts on how, where, when – and even if – people travel, and will reshape the industry over time.
We explored how factors like these could lead to very different worlds in 2023, each holding very different futures for the industry. We worked with tourism experts to create four vivid scenarios, and then generate a vision of the sustainable future the industry wants for itself.
Major companies and organisations have now pledged to collaborate to create a commercially sustainable tourism industry by the year 2023 which benefits communities in tourist destinations and protects the environment.
ABTA, Advantage Travel Centres, British Airways, Carnival UK, Sunvil, The Co-operative Travel, The Travel Foundation, Thomas Cook and TUI Travel were the first to sign the Tourism 2023 Vision. The founding partners are inviting other organisations to sign up to this vision and take part in the next phase of work, which will help shape the future of tourism.
The scenarios, vision and a strategy to implement the commitments were launched at the ABTA Travel Convention in Barcelona on October 8th, 2009. More than 100 people with expertise in different facets of the industry - including business leaders, academics, legislators, campaigners and commentators – have been involved in creating them.
Tourism 2023 is coordinated by Forum for the Future and supported by Defra.
The Tourism 2023 scenarios
The scenarios explore critical uncertainties facing the UK outbound industry, such as the impact of growing domestic demand, climate change, resource scarcity, legislation and increasing travel from emerging economies.
Vivid details bring the world of each scenario to life and are designed to provoke debate. Will mass tourism, swollen by the Chinese and Indian middle classes, cause huge overcrowding in popular destinations? Will soaring oil prices make air travel so expensive that families have to save for years to fly abroad? Will we see “Doomsday tourism”, with visitors rushing to see glaciers and coral reefs before they’re gone for good? Or will household “carbon quotas” see Britons go back to holidaying at home?
The scenarios have been illustrated in four short animations created by students from Goldsmiths College, London. See the box in the right-hand column.
The Tourism 2023 Vision and Strategy
Signatories to the Tourism 2023 Vision commit to taking action individually and as an industry group to achieve a sustainable industry by 2023. It is based on six principles: protecting the environment; developing employees; providing customers with mainstream sustainable products; ensuring that destinations benefit from tourism; innovating to create sustainable transport and resorts; and developing a business which is environmentally, socially and financially sustainable.
The project identified three potential work streams on issues which require urgent industry collaboration: demonstrating that tourism delivers real socio-economic benefit to tourist destinations; making tourism a low-carbon, low-impact industry; and encouraging demand from customers for sustainable tourism.
Next steps
The founding partners and Forum for the Future, ABTA and the Travel Foundation, with the support of Government, are now working together to engage the wider industry and set out a programme of work to deliver the Tourism 2023 Vision. They will also develop a set of measures to evaluate progress.
Get involved
To sign your company up to the Tourism 2023 vision or for an update on ongoing collaborative projects contact Vicky Murray at tourism@forumforthefuture.org
Forum for the Future can also help you use or adapt the Tourism 2023 scenarios to test organisational or regional strategies, policies or to guide sustainable tourism product development. Most recently, we helped SouthWest Tourism in the UK to update their regional tourism strategy. We facilitated a series of workshops to make the scenarios relevant for the area, and we also tested their current strategy in the light of the four, very different, possible futures.
Click here to find out more about how Forum can help you on your sustainable tourism journey.
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Comments
Forum for the Future welcomes constructive comment and differing opinions. We reserve the right not to publish messages which we believe are commercial or designed to disrupt discussion. We moderate comments according to these guidelines.
I thought the Tourism 2023
I thought the Tourism 2023 report was well presented and had some imaginative but likely scenarios. However I did think it was a bit depressing that after 56 pages and obviously lots of hard work that there was actually no proposed solutions to any of the issues. Surely while talking around these subjects with all your knowledgable contributors someone came up with some good ideas that at least could have been hinted towards to show some positive action rather than just talk.
Response to post of 14/10/09
Hi there, Thanks for your comments – yes – we agree with you that moving quickly to find solutions to the challenges facing the tourism industry is vitally important. You’ll see the industry vision on page 48 of the report sets out what a sustainable industry looks like. These are commitments that our project partners, and others, have signed up to achieving in their organisations – including pledges to use more renewable energy, conserve water, minimise waste, protect vulnerable eco-systems and deliver measurable socio-economic benefits to destinations. And bear with us – there are more solutions to come – this is the start of a journey. We’re working with ABTA, The Travel Foundation and others to firm up next steps – so watch this space! We will focus on further collaborative effort – working towards elements of the vision that can’t be achieved by one organisation alone. The proposed workstreams on page 52 of the full report - on sustainable destinations, low carbon innovation and driving customer demand - offer specific focus for ways forward. In the meantime, during the project we came across many initiatives tackling the issues – there are loads of inspiring projects out there. The full list is here: http://www.forumforthefuture.org/files/Log-of-current-initatives-May09.pdf (up to date as of May this year). In addition our partners gave the lowdown on what sustainable solutions they are working on for our launch in October this year – details can be found on our media page: http://www.forumforthefuture.org/tourism-2023 And we’re very pleased you enjoyed the scenarios! Vicky, Senior Sustainability Advisor on Tourism 2023