Green economy and tourism

Frey, Andreas,
Gervers, Susanne

This paper seeks to provide insight into the difficulty of adopting the concept of green tourism due to the conflicting interests of tourism and sustainability: tourism implies going beyond familiar boundaries, embarking on a wide range of travel and conspicuously consuming resources, whereas sustainability implies staying at home, limiting travel and conserving resources. Tourism means travelling to places outside the usual environment and staying there, crossing boundaries, and may be for either leisure or business purposes. The challenge is to find out how to make tourists respect local boundaries, and how to make tourism more compatible with sustainability goals. Recent international criteria for sustainability may guide tour operators, hotels and event managers, but marketing green tourism seems to be inconsistent with leisure travel. In contrast, business travel creates new opportunities for sustainability. We highlight this using two examples: green business travel in Germany and green leisure travel in China.

1    Introduction

Bridging theory and practice in green tourism is possible and necessary: in practice, tourism and sustainability call for intense multilevel cooperation and networking, whereas both need more theory in order to understand their complex references to nature, society and the economy. Furthermore, to be successful in adopting the concept of green tourism, meaning greening the economy and mitigating the negative impacts of economic progress, it is certainly important to know about its difficulty and to reflect on its challenges. Another reason pursue this approach is that professional cooperation requires shared views and common understandings.

First of all, to understand the concept of green tourism, it is essential to look back at its history: the idea of sustainability came up very early and in different cultures, but in 18th century Europe, the so-called Age of Enlightenment, it emerged as a topic in different disciplines reflecting the conditions of human progress, at first emerging in forest management. The 19th century industrial revolution with its pioneering successes did not leave space for these sorts of considerations and intellectual debates and only at the end of the 20th century, faced with the century’s catastrophes and progresses, has the sustainability debate merged as a serious concern for the global community.

Sustainability has seemingly attained more and more predominance in various fields since the 1980s, but only when the Rio Conference in 1992 shaped its conceptual framework and the idea of sustainable development did it emerge as a leading term in the global vocabulary (Grober 2013: 13). Twenty years later, the UN Conference on Sustainable Development, known as Rio+20, reflected on events to date and confirmed that these steps were leading to a more sustainable future. At the same time different groups worked together to define useful sustainability criteria, as will be discussed in chapter three.

Since the Second World War, intensive growth of global tourism has occurred and it has become clear that there has to be control and mitigation of tourism’s negative effects as there has been an increase worldwide from 25 million international tourists in 1950 to 1,087 million and, as estimated, five to six billion domestic tourists in 2013 (UNWTO 2014).

One forecast predicts that international tourism will further increase to 1.8 billion by 2030 (ibid.). Today, tourism already amounts to six per cent of the world’s exports (ibid.), but in basically industrial countries such as Germany, it still is underestimated as an economic factor.

As the tourism industry reacted very slowly to embrace sustainability practices, it became obvious that political action had to be taken and social-political preconditions in Germany were due to change. Events developed to the point where it appeared rather difficult for the tourism industry to reconquer liberal spaces. A central question is: how the opinions about these developments align among tourism scientists and practitioners?

The scientists’ point of view recently has been presented by Conrady (2014: 36), scientific director of the world leading ITB Berlin Congress and president of the German Society of Tourism Research. Conrady pointed out that tourists show opportunistic behaviors and no clear targets are set within the “magic triangle” of ecological, social and economic sustainability, but there is a prominent market segment of 22 per cent (ibid.: 5) for sustainable tourism. Working in this segment to start should avoid confusion and to provide orientation (ibid.) to the question of sustainable tourism.

Orientation has already been given by NGOs from different fields working together on transparency and comparability (see Naturfreunde Internationale et al. 2012), but tourism managers are hesitant to make clear commitments, preferring to say: “We want to sell after all the most beautiful weeks of the year and not the perfect handling of crises and problems” (Nuyken, cited by Hildebrandt 2014: 13, Author’s translation). The statement sustainability “does not play a role” in booking decisions (Leitner-Rauchdobler, cited by Feyerherd 2014: 74; Author’s translation) goes along with the ill-defined idea of implementing the “experience” of sustainability in the luxury niche (ibid.: 75).

What are the reasons and arguments behind these opinions from the tourism line? First of all, we need an understanding of tourist behavior in general; chapter two serves this purpose. We then look at the criteria for sustainable tourism and aspects of corporate responsibility in chapter three. Whether there are sectors in the tourism industry more amenable to green marketing is the subject of chapter four, where we take green business travel in Germany as an example. Green leisure travel will be studied by the example of China in chapter five.

Many challenges for research lie behind the question of green economics and tourism. Chapter six puts forth tentative conclusions regarding the difficulty of forming clear targets in tourism and further raises important questionings about recent trends in the shared economy. Attention is given to, first, the kind of academic research that has to be done to create liberal spaces, and, second, how these spaces could be occupied by entrepreneurial activity and creativity.

2    What is tourism?

For an understanding of tourist behaviour in general we need more theory: what characterizes tourist activity, what is important in creating new products and in understanding the touristic service chain? In fact, little academic research has been done on the preconditions of innovative tourism management as well as on the philosophy and theory of tourism. A theoretical understanding of the many facets of tourism could contribute to many efforts; it would allow us, for instance, to identify and compare the phenomenon in different cultures.

How can we define tourism? The World Tourism Organization defines tourist activity and tourism in its tourism statistics yearbook:

This definition comprises many forms of tourism, but not all of them. It refers to leisure travel as well as to business travel. Tourism appears as a complex phenomenon linked to spatial mobility, ranging from a weekend-trip by car to a long-distance flight, but it can also mean staying in well-known places, if only away from home and for less than a year. In seeking the factors that differentiate the forms of tourism, we come first of all to motivation as decisive, e. g. culture, health or nature as motivations for leisure travel in contrast to the MICE-segment in business travel. Abundant market research exists in the field of motivation, but not enough to show how the different types of tourism activity interact. Still, we can recognize in the definition of tourism four key elements:

–The touristic motif characterizes different sorts of travel and tourism, e. g. arts and culture for a study trip

–Part-time employees of the destination are not regarded as tourists

–The touristic space denotes travel outside day-to-day life, away from the normal sphere and its boundaries

–To reach distant places and to cross boundaries plays a preeminent role

–The touristic mobility in its different aspects, e. g. a bus trip, impacts the travel experience

–Although there is an emotional effect, mobility is mostly seen as a necessity unlike e. g. staying in a hotel

–The touristic duration denotes the time spent away from home and is limited to a year, e. g. holiday travel of four overnight stays or short-term travel with one to three

–Time is a structuring element in the travel experience, creating highly emotional moments such as “once in a lifetime”

Tourism comprises an activity that can be described as a circle moving away from home, staying in a place outside and returning home again. The Greek tornos, where the term tourism comes from, meant a kind of spacious circle. As tourism has become a cultural practice prevailing in contemporary advanced societies, its unrelenting search for new experiences has produced new conflicts, including the potential for overuse of resources, such as fresh water, beaches or mountain locales; the danger to protected wildlife or world heritage places; and the potential to disturb local communities. These conflicts undermine the achievements of the tourism industry and threaten the industry’s prosperity. Numerous examples illustrate how the tourism industry has suffered because of pollution or political crises.

Greening the business is a difficult mission as tourism refers to strong individual motifs. More psychological research is needed to understand tourist behaviour, its inner conflicts and inter-connecting experiences. Various forms of tourism, so-called dark tourism, e. g. slum tourism, as well as extensive sports and other forms, e. g. intensive health care or even cultural events may illustrate what Picard and Di Giovine (2014: 23) describe as “Otherness” in tourism, namely that which can “satisfy desires that are hidden or otherwise repressed in tourists’ everyday lives”. The desire to consume “Otherness” may be associated with high costs for the environment and the hosting society.

How then could tourism be designed as green? What is needed for greening the tourism industry? What are the key factors of success, both from the business perspective and from the perspective of sustainability? To answer these questions, it is necessary to explain sustainable tourism and the problem of responsibility in the service chain.

3    Sustainable tourism

Since cultural and psychological knowledge is needed to understand the role of boundaries in tourism, it becomes clear that the importance of crossing these psychological borders, of breaking the rules of day-to-day life, at least once a year, creates a potential conflict with the idea of sustainability, since this idea is fundamentally linked to the awareness and respect for ecological, social and economic boundaries. There are deep intellectual roots behind this conflict, reaching back to the tradition of Judeo-Christian principles and those of modern capitalism. Traditional forms of Western thought stemming from the ethics of Aristotle also play into this conflict, as do, from another side, the strong focus on balance inspired by Eastern traditions.

Because of the multiple factors at play here, making sustainable tourism a reality requires more fundamental research in how to strengthen the idea of sustainability in the minds of all involved in the tourism industry, whether tourist or tour operators or support services. This goal raises the question of how best to educate these members of the industry. Another challenging strategic demand is to make the goal of sustainability quite clear and to achieve an unequivocal recognition of the standards that go along with it. To come to that point, green thinking requires first of all, as El Dief and Font (2010: 159) highlight, a “holistic view” covering all aspects of business activity instead of a view that seeks to preserve existing practices and uses business communication to “greenwash”, i. e. to disseminate misleading information for the purpose of presenting an environmentally responsible public image. A holistic view is further essential if we are to understand the important cultural and psychological aspects of tourism.

Before developing criteria and performance indicators, the goal of sustainability needs to be operationalized. In 2005 the World Tourism Organization defined sustainable tourism as follows:

There are opinions in the tourism industry altering between uncertainty and avoidance, as have been cited above in chapter one. It is particularly not true that there is no orientation, because since 2012 respective 2013 (GSTC 2012; 2013a; 2013b) internationally accepted criteria have served as guidelines for sustainable tourism and have provided a clear code of conduct for hotels, tour operators and destinations.

Since 2007, 27 organizations, among them the World Tourism Organization and the German market-leader TUI AG, have participated in a cooperative process together with the public. They have worked together in the “Global Sustainable Tourism Council” and have created criteria as a global system of reference, representing “the minimum that any tourism business should aspire to reach”(GSTC 2012). These criteria give a quite clear orientation for any actor directly or indirectly involved in the touristic service chain, not only for business, but also for the tourist or the citizen:

The criteria describes how effective sustainable management can be demonstrated, how social and economic benefits to the local community can be maximized, and how negative impacts of tourism on cultural heritage and the environment can be minimized. The criteria for environmental protection explain conserving of resources (ibid.: D1) and of biodiversity, ecosystems and landscapes (ibid.: D3) and the reduction of pollution (ibid.: D2).

To take an example, reducing pollution refers to minimizing greenhouse gas emissions, wastewater, waste, harmful substances as well as pollution from noise, light, runoff, erosion, ozone-depleting compounds, and air, water and soil contaminants. Indicators for each criteria serve as a management guideline to show exemplary sustainability performance.

 

Before an implementation of these criteria can be considered, we have to first take into account the fact that the touristic service chain is highly complex and sensitive to multiple influences: the touristic product is generated in interaction with diverse tourists, consists of many support services, and is based on an intense collaboration among suppliers and on local networks. Local people play an important role in producing the touristic experience, but they are not directly involved. Sustainable tourism that respects these references can therefore convey an emotional benefit to the tourist seeking a convincing overall experience. If it is a package tour, e. g. a holiday trip, a tour operator designs, creates and controls the travel experience to fulfil the tourist’s wishes. In Europe, due to consumer protection, the tour operator has to take the legal responsibility, e. g. in Germany according to §§ 651 a–m BGB.

Tour operators still play a dominant role in the touristic service chain, but more and more their role has declined as the digital tourist has gained prominence, interacting with service suppliers as well as in new networks where new services have recently emerged from the so-called share economy and now are challenging tour operators’ business models. These commercial or voluntary services offer more opportunities. They give rise to the question, however, of how to get the tourist back into the professional commercial service chain, illustrated by the following:

Another challenge to realizing sustainable tourism can arise from the support services that for many reasons do not go along with the tour operator’s sustainable strategy. Consider two core services of a package tour, transportation and accommodation:

1.In the transportation sector, we find different preconditions for sustainable tourism. Whereas green positioning may appear as a sensible step for a rail company such as the Deutsche Bahn AG, or for the airline industry, it remains extremely difficult for these businesses to adopt green models. The Deutsche Lufthansa AG, by focusing on fuel efficiency, has played a pioneering role, but still has a long way to go before the paradigm change to green thinking fully matches business changes to green practices. The practice, for example, of asking the tourist for voluntary compensation of the greenhouse gas emissions produced by his or her flight has recently been criticized on several grounds. As Schmücker has argued (2011: 140) it is not only a well-established way to fight climate change, but it can also lead to “greenwash” and to unreasonably long distance flights.

 

2.Cost efficiency plays an important role in hotel management because of the typically high fixed costs in the accommodation business. Hence, hotel suppliers have taken on a pioneering role in greening the business. The market leader in Europe, TUI Hotels & Resorts, with 215,590 beds (Lettl-Schröder 2014: 9), serves as an example of sustainable strategy and responsibility, as evidenced by its membership in the Global Sustainable Tourism Council. Lund-Durlacher has pointed out the leading role of the international hotel chains in greening the business (2012: 561f.) and has described different measures to provide ecological sustainability (ibid.: 565f.), but social aspects such as stressful working conditions still remain a problem for the industry, underscoring the fact that sustainability requires a holistic approach. Baddeley and Font (2011: 211) also show for Thomas Cook UK the challenge to address human aspects of behaviour change within the staff to change organizational habits.

 

Global institutions point to the fact that there is a growing demand for greening the tourism industry (UNEP/ UNWTO 2012: 419). This could convince suppliers to invest in sustainable products, but the question remains: what can be done to finally convince the consumer of the value of green tourism? If the tourist is to become responsible for closing the green gap, how should he or she be educated (see also Pomering et al. 2011: 964)?

Wehrli (2013: 26) found that cultural differences need to be taken into account. Whereas in the USA, consumers have appreciated a more direct, educative approach, this has not been the case in Europe. Here, as Wehrli notes, consumer decisions are based less on emotions and, when so based, the decisions so made carry a rather negative connotation. To understand the preconditions of green demand, therefore, there must be more interdisciplinary research.

This research could be done on emotions and happiness, as Ram et al. (2013: 1019) propose, or on emotional benefit-based green positioning, as Lee et al. (2010: 911) suggest. The conflicting goals of emotional benefit and rational sustainability could be merged, as Lee et al. describe, in “selfish altruism” (ibid.: 910). MacCannell, who has made important contributions to the field (1999), explains the difficulty of understanding the tourist’s emotions, which could cause some disorientation (2011: 75). Robinson (2012: 23) refers to the specific methodological challenges of the field; another option could also be found following Khoo-Lattimore and Prideaux (2013) in their search for new psychological and even psychoanalytical methods.

It becomes obvious that only if the tourist attains an emotional benefit can tour operators or the service suppliers succeed. Anything that detracts from this benefit provokes either reluctance from the industry or withdrawal. McKercher (2014) demonstrated in the Hong Kong market that respondents of the travel trade avoided green topics not to question higher sales provisions, e. g. for long distance flights, but simply to turn over responsibility to the producer’s side of the service chain, i. e. the tour operator or the airline industry. Another study in the UK (Burns 2014: 762) showed that airlines have behaved quite the same way and handed over their responsibility to the consumer’s side.

From this perspective a central research question has emerged: how to provide a setting for tourism management that will motivate the decision makers to take over responsibility for sustainability. Recent contributions to this question have been made (Lovelock and Lovelock 2013; Goodwin 2011; Mundt 2011; Müller 2007) and to social justice as another aspect of the problem (Wearing et al. 2012: 48), but a stronger focus would necessarily emphasize the role of political governance and of corporate citizenship. Because for these considerations ethics are essential and go far behind the idea of compliance, an intellectual debate is needed to create awareness for sustainable criteria. The ethics of sustainable tourism have to be developed over a long period of civic activity as a positive experience.

There have been several attempts to shape the green values: the Global Code of Ethics for Tourism (see UNWTO 2001) gives a clear orientation for these values and the UN Global Compact (see UN 2000; 2004; 2013) with its ten essential principles enables business and civic groups to participate in the process of implementing green criteria. But, in fact, the tourism industry does not show much commitment here, either because there could be better communication of these UN-initiatives, or because the tourism industry does not yet see the importance of political activity and of professional lobbying as prerequisites for economic sustainability.

Consider the participants of the UN Global Compact: the tourism industry is almost absent. Among the 342 participants from Germany, only five come from the tourism industry; these include the Deutsche Lufthansa AG, which first joined in 2002 (UN n. d.). The UK has sent 322 participants, but only five from the tourism industry, those since 2007, but two of which do “not communicate” (ibid.). Among the 286 participants from China, three came from the tourism industry, among those the China National Travel Service (HK) Group Corporation which joined in 2012 (ibid.).

If the emotional benefit for the tourist comes under question, a strong commitment from the industry appears difficult. The sectors of the industry that are less dependent on the complex and highly variable dynamics of leisure travel, namely those serving business travellers, could then assume a pioneering role, as we will see in the next chapter.

4    Green business travel in Germany

Sustainable business travel has emerged as an important topic, but if we look, for example, at the business travel segment in Germany, we also find some incoherence. Sustainable criteria are still of little relevance for travel managers in the German source market (DRV 2014: 61); efficiency and cost savings are in the top ranks, while only 16 per cent prioritize ethical values (Pracht and Jürs 2014: 21) when planning a business trip.

On the other hand, Germany presents itself very successfully as a green business travel destination (GNTB 2014b; 2012): the traditional business travel, e. g. visiting partners, and the promotable business travel, e. g. trade fairs and conventions, have added up to 12.6 million business trips in 2014 (GNTB 2014a: 15). In many aspects, Germany is the first choice for business travel in Europe: it not only attracts most of the 61.0 million business trips, but it also is the first choice for a conference location in Europe, and the second one worldwide after the USA. As a destination for trade fairs, Germany ranks first (ibid.: 14).

Additionally, a strong national image could has developed since the reunification: the “lasting impact of the World Cup, plus sporting success define Germany’s international image, just as much as museums, design and music” (ibid.: 6). Germany’s leadership in green technology, e. g. renewable energies, may also play a decisive role in branding the country and its tourism industry.

Further growing, there are actually 4.5 per cent more, i. e. 31.5 million, international arrivals in Germany (ibid.: 8), and the segment of promotable business trips even adds to five per cent and now sums up to 6.9 million trips, or 55 per cent of all business trips (ibid.: 15). In 2012, business travel was highlighted as a special issue with a focus on green meetings and accessibility; sustainability was seen a competitive advantage (Tödter 2012: 61). Germany’s green positioning strategy is strongly international. Its website www.germany.travel offers information in 26 languages and received the Gold Award from the Pacific Asia Travel Association (BMWi 2013: 32).

But this positioning is not yet finished. Große Ophoff (2012: 180) points out that the widely known Green Globe certification system works on a voluntary basis without full transparency. Green events are “designed, organized and implemented in a way that minimizes negative environmental impacts and leaves a positive legacy for the host community” (UNEP 2009: 9) and therefore need more transparency.

Although there is a potential for conflict in working toward sustainability, at least the goal appears clear to both sides. There is not a deep-seated psychological conflict at work within the motivations for business travel, as there is for leisure travel. The tourist’s emotions only come up when making use of the free time on a business trip; for the most part, as the trip is for business, reasonable thinking is the only decisive factor, especially as it embraces efficiency and cost saving. Furthermore, green positioning helps managers to communicate with their stakeholders and to participate in public or political debates; it offers effective opportunities to influence these debates and to create good will.

The national framework for greening business travel as well as its individual setting could cut liberally into spaces of the tourism industry. In order to keep these spaces open for business activity, political action has to be taken.

5    Green leisure travel in China

On becoming the largest economy in the world, China became on the other hand the worldleader in CO2 emissions (Xue et al. 2013). The reasons behind this are manifold. The economy developed rapidly since China’s reform in 1978, the environmental pollution has never been fundamentally controlled and hence, especially due to the high energy consumption, the carbon emissions increased dramatically.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, China set-up a number of laws and regulations related to low carbon economy. In the Copenhagen conference China proposed to reduce its carbon emissions/GDP by 40–50 per cent by 2020 relative to 2005 (see Xue et al. 2013). This can be seen in the 11th and 12th Five-Year Plan. In the 11th Five-Year Plan (starting from 2006) a reduction in energy and in the 12th Five-Year Plan the low carbon development was declared.

China’s international tourism industry developed rapidly in the last thirty years due to the implementation of the economic reform and due to the openness to the outside of the world (Zhang et al. 2000). This can be also seen by the statistics of the World Tourism Organization (WTO) which ranked China on place seven worldwide in 1998 as for the number of international tourist arrivals and predicted China to be ranked first in 2020 with 137 millions of arrivals. Furthermore, the WTO predicted China to be ranked fourth in 2020 with respect to the number of outbound tourist departures.

The World Tourism Organization showed (UNWTO 2009) in 2009 that the tourism sector accounts for five per cent of the total greenhouse gas emission, with two per cent for aviation and three per cent for tourism excluding aviation. It is further estimated that the latter part will grow at 2.5 per cent per year until 2035. Furthermore, Gössling (Gössling 2002) showed that in 2001 the tourism sector accounts for 3.9 per cent of the global energy consumption. Wu and Shi (Wu et al. 2011) focused on China and showed the energy consumption and CO2-emission of tourism-related transport in China in 2008. They calculated that the tourism sector in China contributed in 2008 to less than one per cent of the nationwide energy consumption and to less than one per cent of the nationwide carbon dioxide emissions. Having in mind that the tourism industry is rapidly growing and that China tops the world in CO2 emissions, these numbers have to be reduced. This leads to the development of the Low-Carbon Tourism in China, in accordance with the 12th Five-Year Plan.

Due to the above-described effects, low-carbon tourism is growing in China and recently scientific papers can be found on this topic. In a first paper, (Zhibo 2012) described the current situation of green tourism in China. (Wang et al. 2012) then defined low-carbon tourism as a kind of low power consumption and low pollution tourism, which is an important and necessary contribution to the 12th Five-Year Plan. According to Wang et al., low-carbon tourism, which has brought new opportunities for today’s tourism style transformation, is becoming the trend of the future development of tourism, since on the basis of the protection of the natural environment, low-carbon tourism is intended to ensure the sustainable development of health tourism.

How the low-carbon tourism system in China can work in practice can be recently seen in the papers from (Xiao et al. 2013) and (Xu et al. 2014), who analyse the effects of such a system in detail.

6    Conclusions

How can tourism be made part of the green economy? Tourism, by itself, is difficult to transform into an integral part of sustainable processes; only if the tourist’s motivation can be steered into the direction of a more sustainable tourism can the tourism industry become a part of the green economy and benefit from this paradigm change. As political action has been taken to define useful criteria, it has become clear that the tourism industry is avoiding a clear commitment to sustainability, as only a small number of tour operators and service suppliers have been working together with NGOs to promote it. To understand this, the complexity of the touristic service chain has to be taken into account as well as the new challenges of having the sharing economy answer tourist’s wishes in a completely different way.

As targets and responsibilities have not been clearly defined by the tourism industry, politics has moved into to occupy the space. In Germany, green business travel has been mutually reinforced by state, industry and destination management, as the underlying principles could have made clear. In China, the 11th and 12th Five-Year-Plans have significantly contributed to the development of the low-carbon tourism.

The growth of global tourism as a leading industry has positive and negative impacts; all forms of tourism could contribute to a green economy, but in different ways. First of all, clear targets are needed, and then a clear understanding of the tourist’s wishes. New trends, as actually emerging from the share economy, could help identify motivations for travel and tourism, if these trends are not fought by the established line. More academic research, on the theory of tourism and travel and also on its psychological boundaries, could answer relevant questions, such as: how can supporters of a more sustainable tourism motivate and influence other stakeholders to show commitment? As the tourism industry is dominated by SMEs, the question of free access could be regarded as critical. There is also more knowledge needed, on theory and structures as well as on measurable targets: what are the ethics strengthening theses attempts, how to encourage innovation for sustainability?

In pluralistic consumer societies, it may cause some disturbances to insist on ethical values. As these, however, can serve as a foundation to make tourism more sustainable and governance implies defining such priorities, the question of social justice arises. Namely how can governance, either public or private, use liberal spaces to make education for sustainability more successful?

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