"Tourism Life Cycle Assessment (LCA): Proposal of a new methodological framework for sustainable consumption and production"

1. Introduction Tourism is one of largest and fastest growing economic sectors worldwide, in spite of occasional shocks over the last decade (UNWTO 2010). Tourism’s contribution to the gross domestic product (GDP) is – when direct contribution and multipliers are included - estimated at up to 10% in some advanced, diversified economies. Also tourism and travel has become an important part of modern life styles. However, this strong growth also implies an increase of undesired environmental impacts. Tourism is globally responsible for 5% of all carbon dioxide emissions, the most important greenhouse gas causing climate change (UNWTO UNEP WMO 2008). However, in terms of radiative forcing, the direct measure for contribution to climate change, tourism even could have share of up to 12.5% (Scott et al., 2010). Also, the greenhouse gas emissions of tourism are estimated to grow at a rather large rate, while a globally emissions should be reduced with up to 80% by 2050 (e.g. Scott et al., 2010). Finally it has been shown that the eco-efficiency – the economic contribution per ton emissions – of tourism is rather low (Gössling et al., 2005). A wide range of environmental instruments have been developed so far for assessment and labelling/certification purposes of travel and tourist services. This ongoing proliferation of different initiatives shows a high degree of diversity in terms of scope, assessment methodologies and means and tools of communication. Although this proliferation reflects the vast variety of travel and tourist products and the complexity in assessing their environmental performance, these environmental instruments seem to suffer from a lack of integration and standardisation or quality control. This situation has the potential to confuse or even mislead travellers and the stakeholders within the industry. Research questions were: · What environmental instruments and initiatives are currently supporting the application of the European Sustainable Consumption and Production (SCP) Action Plan in the travel and tourism industry? · What are their key characteristics and how do they stand in relation to Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) principles? · How can these instruments be combined in a general framework capable to render this industry low carbon and more sustainable from an environmental viewpoint? In order to answer these questions, the existing environmental instruments in the European travel and tourism industry are initially analysed in this paper. Possible methodological improvements are then outlined for each instrument and initiative. By setting up possible linkages among the existing instruments, we finally present a proposal for a new platform enabling travellers to plan eco-friendly holidays in Europe. 2. Methods As the scope of this research was mostly bounded to Europe, sector-specific instruments for sustainable consumption and production were searched by consulting: relevant scientific literature about European projects, EU-founded project databases (e.g. LIFE+ project database), and relevant web-sites on existing networks for sustainable tourism development such as Tour Operators Initiative (www.toinitiative.org), Ecotrans – European Network for Sustainable Tourism Development (www.ecotrans.org), and the DestiNet portal - UN Partnership for Sustainable Development (http://destinet.eu/). Existing instruments and initiatives were analysed according to their focus, their current dissemination, and how they stand in relation to the principles of LCA, claimed to be the best methodology for assessing the environmental issues of products and services over their life cycle (European Commission 2003). On the basis of this analysis, methodological improvements and synergies opportunities were identified to come out with the general methodological framework for the new platform enabling travellers to plan eco-friendly holidays in Europe. 3. Results The key results of this research are listed below. 3.1 Sector-specific environmental instruments for sustainable tourism · Travelife – a sustainability management system for tour operators which includes an eco-labelling scheme to qualify tour operator’s suppliers (e.g. hotel, holiday village, restaurant) (Kusters 2004); · EU eco-label for accommodation structures and camp sites (European Commission 2009; European Parliament 2008); · Blue Flag (FEE 2009) – a voluntary award for beaches and marinas; · Other tourist environmental labels and declarations (e.g. Viabono, Legambiente Turismo, The Green Key, Milieubarometer, Ibex-label, EPD, and many others) (Buckley 2002; Font 2002; Font and Buckley 2001; Sloan et al. 2009); · Visit Initiative – technical standard setting the framework by which credible tourism eco-labels should operate in Europe (Hamele et al. 2004); · TourBench – a freely available monitoring and benchmarking tool for reducing environmental loads and internal costs of tourist accommodation organisations (Hamele and Eckardt 2007; Hamele and van der Burgh 2006); · EcoPassenger – a user-friendly internet tool to cross-compare energy consumption, CO2 and other exhaust atmospheric emissions of alternative transport modes for travelling all around Europe (Knörr 2008). 3.2 Improving existing sector-specific environmental instruments Criteria of environmental labels (e.g. EU eco-label and those under the Visit initiative) should be set up according to the findings from a representative set of LCA case studies to be conducted in the travel and tourism sector. A similar approach should be adopted to improve Travelife, a sustainability management system specifically developed for tour operators. This management system, which is relatively widespread, could be further improved by integrating LCA findings into the environmental criteria used for qualifying tour operator suppliers. TourBench, a freely available monitoring and benchmarking tool for reducing environmental loads and internal costs of tourist accommodation organisations, might be improved by broadening its scope to other tourist services and covering their entire life cycle. The scope of Ecopassenger might be enlarged to additional transport modes and environmental indicators. 3.2 Methodological framework for sustainable consumption and production in the travel and tourism industry Potential synergies among existing sector-specific environmental instruments were investigated. On this basis, a new sustainable consumption instrument enabling to plan eco-friendly travels was outlined. In particular, this instrument is expected to allow travellers to plan “from door to door” eco-friendly holidays by indicating the most eco-friendly destinations and organisations (i.e transport modes, accommodation services and other tourist services). This might be possible if: · Environmental footprint of package holidays could be calculated by combining performance-based environmental labels (e.g. EPD) with scientifically-sound footprint calculators (e.g. Ecopassenger, TourBench); · Booking platforms and web-sites inserted the environmental performance of travel services next to their quality information and feedback, and allowed users to sort out results according to their environmental performance. Setting up an environmental footprint calculator for tourist services on the basis of the TourBench framework and LCA sector-specific guidelines, would facilitate the creation of an extensive database from which an average environmental performance of the labelled organizations might be extrapolated for each product category. Average environmental performance data might be then used for: · Deriving robust criteria for Type I ecolabelling schemes; · Identifying environmental hot-spots to be taken into account in eco-design processes (Misceo et al., 2004; De Camillis et al, 2010). 4. Conclusions A new methodological framework for sustainable consumption and production in the travel and tourism industry has been outlined in this paper. This framework includes, inter alia, a proposal for a new platform enabling travellers to plan eco-friendly holidays in Europe. Learning from the experience of the European Food SCP Round Table co-chaired by the European Commission and food supply chain partners (Peacock, De Camillis et al. 2011), significant results in the sustainable production and consumption field might be achieved if key stakeholders are equally involved in developing and fine-tuning a harmonised framework methodology for the environmental assessment and communication of products. A similar initiative would be advisable for the travel and tourism industry because the ongoing proliferation of environmental assessment methodologies and communication forms has the potential to confuse or even mislead travellers and other stakeholders. Integration of instruments, synergies among initiatives and general consensus across supply chain partners on methodological and communication aspect are needed to come out with stronger measures for sustainable consumption and production in the travel and tourism industry.