Governments, hotels and major tourism operators must take the lead in boosting environmentally-friendly tourism, which has yet to make a major impact on the industry, experts said at a UN-backed conference on climate change Friday.
The industry was slow to adopt sustainable environmental practices because the sector was huge, fragmented, and covered small operators preoccupied with earning a living rather than thinking about preserving the environment, they said.
That was why big players such as governments, airlines and hotels should take the lead, according to industry experts attending the final day of the UN-backed Business Summit for the Environment in Singapore. "A lot of the people who are in tourism, they are very poor people from villages," said Anthony Wong, managing director of Malaysia-based Asian Overland Services Tours and Travel.
"They are small operators - they can be boat operators, they can be small hotel operators. These people don't have a world-wide view, they are not aware of the negative side of travel," he told AFP after speaking at the conference.
"What they want to do is just earn a living... They cannot think too deep, too wide. So it is up to the association, the government and the big players to lead and push it down to the suppliers, the agents, the transport operators," Wong said. More than 100 million people were employed in the tourism industry in the Asia Pacific region, he said.
Wong, also on the board of the Pacific Asia Travel Association, said increasing awareness of climate change could push the tourism industry to accelerate acceptance of sustainable environmental practices. This still might take another 20 years, he said.
"We have to start now. It is not a happy situation," he said. Rachel Dodds, a specialist in sustainable tourism and assistant professor at Ryerson University in Toronto, said one of the industry's challenges was that once a development was built, it could not easily be undone.
Many industry players are also focused on earnings. But Dodds said the situation was changing as consumers increasingly want a more unique holiday experience. "They don't want to sit on the beach with 5,000 other people. They want something clean," she told AFP.
"You can have the best service in a hotel.... but if you go outside and the beach is dirty, there is no experience." The cruise liner business was one tourism sector in which environmental standards could be implemented, Dodds said, citing reports of cruise ships dumping sewage at sea. She referred to a study showing that of the 100 worst companies in the United States, six were tourism firms. Five of those were cruise lines.
As a late bloomer in the industry, China was in a position to lead the way for responsible tourism development, said Claire Chiang, senior vice president of Singapore-based luxury resort developer Banyan Tree Holdings.
With 25 million people travelling to cities within the country each year, and its fast-paced economic growth, tourism in China could either help destroy the environment or preserve it, she told the conference.
"With them developing so late, they can learn all the bad practices, not repeat them and do better," Chiang said. Tourism and preservation of the environment could go together, she added. Banyan Tree's Ringha resort in Tibet used discarded materials from local people dismantling their lodges to build newer, more modern homes. "You're definitely going to take something from nature. But the issue next is how do we restore and rehabilitate," she said.
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