Tourism2030 - November2022-11-25T09:41:53Ztag:destinet.eu,2022-11-25:/News/2022/11https://destinet.eu/misc_/EnviroWindows/Site.gifECOTRANSTourism2030CoP (Out)27, in the Winter of 2022 – A Global Policy Journey Going Green 2030tag:destinet.eu,2022-11-05:/News/2022/11/cop-out-27-in-the-winter-of-2022-a-global-policy-journey-going-green-20302022-11-05T11:23:31ZGordon SillenceGordon Sillence<p style="text-align: justify;"><em><span style="font-size: 12pt;">04 Nov 2022 - Gordon Sillence, Monchique (Portugal)<br /></span></em></p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: #0079bc;"><strong>Introduction</strong></span></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">I am inviting readers to take a broader view of tourism in our troubled times at this end of 2022 CoP 27 turning point, and to recognise our need to professionally stand up against greenwash policies and time-washing processes, and pay attention to critical issues underpinning tourism activity, offering solutions to problems not more <em>blah blah blah</em> this year again.…</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><em>‘It’s about time tourism stakeholders stop believing political fairy tales and understand that to make 2030 a fairy tale ending we need sustainable development as a whole package – Marshall-planned and bank-financed on an international scale to support global civil society, not governments or corporates, and to protect key habitats and species, not pay off bankers and bureaucrats. Or, in the onslaught of multiple crises our much-needed tourism businesses in our much-loved destinations – wherever we are – will face fearful uncertainty and fail en masse here and there, now and again, as we saw during Covid. No-one escape Global Change …’</em></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><em><img style="width: 500px; height: 613px; margin: 0px auto; display: block;" src="/images/copout-27-logo.png" width="500" height="613" /></em></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: #0079bc;"><strong>A Policy Journey to Agenda 2030 - the 2015 SDGs on Trial</strong></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">With the first half of November given over to a sterile UN Action on the climate part of Global Change (SDG 13 Climate Action), exasperation at inaction comes from the very top – this year’s IPCC Report authoring team so critical of lack of government and corporate implementation - so why bother with the CoP(Out)26 Glasgow UK follow-up, being held in Egypt from next week under the auspices of a national dictatorship? I won’t be going there this time, but I was in the Sharm-el-Sheik Egyptian flagship destination for the 2018 CoP15 on Biodiversity (SDG 14,15 Life below Water and Life on Land) . At last year’s CoP 26 the links between the two UN processes of Climate Change and Biodiversity have shown a clear picture of the green -washing, time-washing political maintenance of the post WW2 Bretton Woods status quo and the resulting tragedy of the Commons that is now upon us al 70 years in the making. Wherever you look, water, forests, farms, mountains, cities are suffering the consequences of a rapacious nationalist luxury growth model …</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong>Johannesburg +20</strong></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Anthropogenic Global Change evidenced in multiple sócio-economic and environmental challenges is upon us, with biodiversity loss and extreme weather events about to cripple global supply chains and the biological integrity of our habitat as the 1.5°C target fades into history… And that’s without viral wars, mass depression, greed and ignorance steering this emergency on planet earth. By 2030 we will be in the death throes of a Brave New World of elitist military-industrial economics, with the national economies of several countries possibly run into the ground by their big data algorithms, ironically… </span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Of course there will still be a holiday option to travel our One Planet … and the dreams of over one hundred countries around the world to develop <strong>sustainable tourism</strong> at the WSSD 2002 in Johannesburg hang in the balance, with enough for everyone’s need, but not enough for everyone’s greed.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong> </strong></span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong> </strong></span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong> <img style="width: 900px; height: 676px; margin: 0px auto; display: block;" src="/images/fire-risk-warning-board.jpg" width="900" height="676" /></strong></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong><em>Life in a Local Village – Marmelete, Monchique BioPark Network 2022</em></strong></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong>Rio +30</strong></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">The alternative of Agenda 21 sustainability offers the opposite vision, one in which we get past elitist nationalist geo-political globalised capitalism and join joined-up government with civil society, evolving from the current situation in which national governments support corporate multi-national interests, and instead developing our institutions and their economic activities into something more considerate and humane. There is an urgent need to shape global and national policy lines into regional and local programmes for the major resourcing of civil society - where local government resides alongside the other Major Groups - to immediately and effectively implement evidenced-based adaptation and mitigation strategies in the interests of people and planet, i.e. stimulating local and regional sustainability planning and development.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong>Stockholm +50</strong></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">If not from the podium, it is clear to all in the policy world in the corridors and coffee breaks that the local level is overwhelmed by current fluctuations and instability in the international level of governance. International politics has become UN Bretton Woods archaic and Security Council dominated, unfit for managing the UN system to manage the globe. Never more than before do we need to ensure the UN’s mission of peace as the base for sustainable development yet … Once again clear for all in Ukraine, the finance capitalist political few have institutionalised means of oppressing the now billions of the ordinary many, but this time with AI enhanced mega corporate cyber capabilities and a full lockdown conflict agenda for working and middle classes alike.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Furthermore, the 50 years of Down to Earth talk on the woes of nature and the death throes of indigenous cultures round the world has been green-washed over by the media, whilst the biodiversity and habitat loss figures underline the failure of implementation of a new Millennium path to sustainability that the UN and national governments are so often accused of in their time-washing procrastinations.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> </p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong><em><img style="width: 900px; height: 676px; margin: 0px auto; display: block;" src="/images/fire-smoke-plume.jpg" width="900" height="676" /></em></strong></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong><em>4km away in the surrounding forested hills, one of the dozens of devastating fires that now occur in the region on an annual baisis in the habitat of key enangered species – the iberian lynx and Bonnelli’s eagle - an ecotoursim paradise disappearing on our watch - from my balcony.</em></strong></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong> </strong></span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong> </strong></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong>Agenda 21 – the Need for Good Governance and the Law of Sustainable Development</strong></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">I am old enough to have been at the table when in 1992 they established the three Conferences of the Parties on climate, biodiversity and chemicals, which makes me old enough to have seen the dragging of feet and nuancing of final resolutions that has paralysed all the good intentions of those of us who both know enough and care enough to bring good governance to the fore and competently and compassionately confront the spectre of Finance Capitalism and personal greed driving us all over the precipice of economic, environmental and cultural ruin and back to autocratic oppressive privatized state barbarism. At we knew this in the year 2000, when the <em>Law of Sustainable Development</em> (DG Environment 2000) spelt out clearly the large-scale systemic changes that need large-scale systemic responses. Yet no-one seemed to understand, listen or act, and that triple failure of policy makers and captains of industry is now playing out its final hand.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong><em><img style="width: 900px; height: 341px; margin: 0px auto; display: block;" src="/images/monchique-sunset.jpg" width="900" height="341" /></em></strong></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong><em>2022 Fire Season Sunset over the BioPark - Horsemen on the Horizon</em></strong></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong>CoP 27 – Why Bother? </strong></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Compared to the discussions on the reform of global governance the CoP 27 debates will resemble a pantomime of suited villains playing doctors and nurses to poor mother nature – note the British fiasco being led by Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, both populist right wing attention seekers whose green track records are deplorable - our leaders and other clever people wrapping themselves in the spotlight of media attention to repeat carbon neutral sound-bytes with net-zero value. </span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">So why would I still follow this process when even the key authors of this year’s IPCC report highlight the total inaction and underperformance of government to meet their own targets? I work in the field of <strong>travel and tourism</strong> and clearly see it is the energy sector that needs to be revolutionised to deal with CO2 outputs, and its often the extractive industries that are decimating the quality of our landscapes and biodiversity alongside the travel and tourism sector, with its luxury and mass tourism models. Multiple sectoral impacts, with multiple thematic consequences, involving multiple stakeholders needing multi-level governance across all sectors. Ours included.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: #0079bc;"><strong>Crying Out for Good Governance – Using ICT- Shaped Territorial Clusters</strong></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">To meet that complexity, what needs to be developed is a serious good governance plan at all levels to evolve both supply chains and territories in a sustainable direction. Clustering can do that. 2030 Agendas, Green Deals, Transition Pathways and Glasgow Declarations are all well and good, but what the sector needs is a cross-cutting approach to its successful development and management. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong><em><img style="width: 900px; height: 676px; margin: 0px auto; display: block;" src="/images/aridification-barrragem-de-bravura.jpg" width="900" height="676" /></em></strong></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong><em>Aridification of key reservoirs across the region, here in the Barragem de Bravura. No water = no biodiversity, no community, no tourism, Full Stop</em></strong></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">As such tourism sectoral development activities can be implemented via clusters of stakeholders who can champion regional tourism development. <strong>As such tourism sustainability becomes a vector for overall sustainable development, used to organise regional supply chains that link across all sectors and thematic fields.</strong> Such clusters of tourism sustainability offers will be in reach of the burgeoning consumer markets of the leisure society that looms for the billions of jobless and homeless.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: #0079bc;"><strong>The Going Green 2030 Agenda – Walking the Walk</strong></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">The greening of tourism provides green travel, green products and services green jobs, and green destinations. As part of civil society’s efforts to encourage multi-stakeholder collaboration (SDG 17), what we are bringing to CoP27 is not more blah blah blah…but with EU COSME funding in the ETGG 2030 project the <em>Travel Green Planet</em> initiative has matured into an online tourism SME sustainability support system that can be used to develop SCP supply chain certification from the local to global level. The <a href="/etgg2030"><em>Going Green 2030 SME Sustainability system</em></a> can be used by business and destinations to check their readiness for 3<sup>rd</sup> Party certification and entry in to the current 15,000 strong <em>Sustainable Tourism 2030 Market Place. A figure which needs to be 10 times higher by 2030!</em></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong><span style="font-size: 12pt;">It’s about time tourism stakeholders stop believing political fairy tales and understand that to make 2030 a fairy tale ending we need sustainable development as a whole package – Marshall-planned and bank-financed on an international scale to support global civil society, not governments or corporates, and to protect key habitats and species, not pay off bankers and bureaucrats.</span></strong></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong><em><img style="width: 900px; height: 705px; margin: 0px auto; display: block;" src="/images/etgg2030-landing-page.png" width="900" height="705" /></em></strong></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong><em>ETGG 2030 Bringing policy lines from the UN SDG Agenda 2030 and EU Green Transition into a practical green business implementation clustered programme </em></strong></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Or, in the onslaught of multiple crises our much-needed tourism businesses in our much-loved destinations – wherever we are – will face fearful uncertainty and fail <em>en masse</em> here and there, now and again, as we saw during Covid. <em>Yet the tourism industry also has a leading role to play in the solution - cutting across sectors and issues, bringing actors together, not altruistically, but with everyone’s self-interest at stake</em> … the desire to travel will never stop, but will the journey be worthwhile? The smart money is on clustering if we are to meet multiple changes, no joined up governance of sustainability implementation is possible without such ICT connected stakeholder networks.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Collaborative action at the regional level to ensure the greening of business supply chains offers the only long-term path to commercial and environmental resilience. If joined up government reigns in the petro-chemical, mining, construction giants, restricts unfettered tourism development, and instead enacts policies and programmes that resource the people to run this one fragile planet regionally and responsibly, and every business plays its part, and every citizen acts accordingly, then we may have a chance to defeat ignorance and enmity, attain community and prosperity and preserve our priceless natural heritage. If tourism stakeholders can help lead the way, then I’m happy to be party to this CoP Out 2022, in our post-covid Winter of Dis-Content, made Summer by the Solar Age to come…</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong><em>Gordon Sillence (ICT Director Tourism 2030) invites you to a post CoP 27 debrief on Wednesday November 30<sup>th</sup>. 3.00 – 4.30 pm CET. </em></strong><em> </em></span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><em>Please see</em> <a href="/who-who/civil-society-ngos/travel-green-planet-2030-initiative">https://destinet.eu/who-who/civil-society-ngos/travel-green-planet-2030-initiative</a> </span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong><em><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Images: from Monchique Natura 2000 Zone Algarve Southern Portugal</span></em></strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong><em><span style="font-size: 12pt;">CONTACT: <a href="mailto:gordon.sillence@ecotrans.de">gordon.sillence@ecotrans.de</a> </span></em></strong></p>CoP (Out)27, in the Winter of 2022 – A Policy Journey Going Green 2030 PART II 3rd Degree Burns tag:destinet.eu,2022-11-16:/News/2022/11/cop-out-27-in-the-winter-of-2022-a-policy-journey-going-green-2030-part-ii-3rd2022-11-16T12:31:30ZGordon SillenceGordon Sillence<p style="text-align: justify;"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>CoP (Out)27, in the Winter of 2022 – A Policy Journey Going Green 2030 PART II </strong><strong> 3rd Degree Burns </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>This is the 2<sup>nd</sup> in a series of 3 articles by Gordon Sillence ICT Director Tourism 2030 for CoP 27 5<sup>th</sup> -18<sup>th</sup> November 2022</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><em>In the previous article I attempted to highlight tourism as a vector for overall sustainable development in the CoP 27 deliberations. Here I’m looking to give tourism stakeholders a chance to see how the overall global governance system needs to change for tourism sector to flourish, and what part we can play in meeting the challenge of climate change by making our own sector’s sustainable development implementation a reality. But moving from rhetoric to results is still currently the path less travelled in all sectors, and if we don’t watch out our greedy leaders are set to lead us over the edge, beyond 1.5 degrees, and human society and our biosphere’s future changes forever </em></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><em> </em><em> <img style="width: 795px; height: 447px; margin: 0px auto; display: block;" src="/images/picture1.png-1" width="704" height="396" /></em></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><em> </em><em> </em><em>The CoP(Out) on Youtube – it made so many meetings of professional discussion accessible to all, but the viewer figures were indicative of our age … next year’ sCoP should build this for better civil society engagement, then we wouldn’t have to fly halfway round the world …</em></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><em> S</em><em>o what can we take away from more than a week of usually well-meaning but weak UN Speak? By virtue of the whole CoP being streamed live on YouTube which is itself a landmark in accessibility to governance processes, I attended as many online sessions as I could - including the travel and tourism sector contributions - and the message is now very clear. This is being seen as the +3 degrees CoP, and we are being prepared for adaptation, not mitigation, abandoning the 1.5 goal that is now seen as unreachable with current economic activity projections</em>.’</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> <strong>An Historic Day during CoP 27 </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Some days are more historic than others. Passing into the second week of the turgid bureaucratic proceedings of the 27<sup>th</sup> Conference of the Parties on Climate Change, we again briefly shine a much-needed multi-stakeholder spotlight on the priority of internationally discussing how to avoid the devastating effects of extreme weather becoming the norm. </p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><img style="width: 930px; height: 524px; margin: 0px auto; display: block;" src="/images/picture4.jpg" width="930" height="524" /> <em>From 2 billion to 8 billion in a hundred years … we better have a good global plan to keep us all happy …</em></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><em> </em>On the day the human population reached 8 billion people, we humans are conducting our 27th global meeting on the weather, in the midst of multiple conversations on multiple crises of poverty, inequality, tyranny, violence and war. Three decades have tumultuously passed since the climate convention was birthed in the prescient Agenda 21 shaped by the UN and Civil Society in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 to counter the plethora of problems seen as the challenges of global change. In the 21<sup>st</sup> century</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">. <img style="width: 753px; height: 423px; margin: 0px auto; display: block;" src="/images/picture5.png" width="602" height="338" /></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><em>UN President Antonio Guterres presiding over multiple crises with no real power to improve national collaboration </em></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> <strong>More Green-washing, more Time-washing…</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">27 years where the talk has been Babylonian and the action pure business as usual… The time-washing and green-washing by global institutions, politicians and corporations have now taken their toll on critical eco-systems and human populations, and the open criticism of national governments and international governance for their two-faced rhetoric has not just been left for the youth of today to shout out on street corners - even the research team who produced this years’ IPCC report has publicly decried the lack of action by governments during the dawn of this millennium.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Still, on the streets Greta Thunberg seems to be on message, with her timely <em>Emergency on Planet Earth</em> book published to cement her urgent calls for real change. Meanwhile the Code Red announced by the UN mirrors the urgency yet still lacks the authority. So you would think that the Major Group youth could be empowered to transform their societies in a functional UN that was uncoupled from its Bretton Woods roots and brought into the modern world as the global body that offers us the opportunity of global good governance.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> <img style="width: 742px; height: 417px; margin: 0px auto; display: block;" src="/images/picture6.png" width="653" height="367" /></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><em>Audiences at the CoPOut being kept in the dark and muzzled for silence to endure the greenspeak</em></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><em> </em><strong>The Need for Global Good Governance</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The UN is holding the scorecard, but the nation states, their financial institutions and multi-national corporations have the energy and transport cards in their hands and the decks stacked in their favour – the oil and gas industry and global tanker and lorry cargo infrastructure is not going anywhere soon, but is in fact Belton Road bigger and backed up by nation state military policing, hi tech surveillance and all pervasive communications, making it even easier to fragment ecosystems, frack up the landscape all over the planet, and martyr those who have died in their fights for climate justice.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> To bring government and business in line with sustainability, major reforms and refinancing of the UN and its relation to member nation states should be high on the CoP agenda, but its not really. If good governance is to be seen as the key antidote to poor implementation then linking government to civil society and the needs of people is the necessary institutional transformation to make to resolve multiple crises.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>The 3 Degree CoP – a Burning Future Issue</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">So what can we take away from more than a week of usually well-meaning but weak UN Speak? By virtue of the whole CoP being streamed live on YouTube, I attended as many online sessions as I could - including the travel and tourism sector contributions - and the message is now very clear. This is being seen as the +3 degrees CoP, and we are being prepared for adaptation, not mitigation, abandoning the 1.5 goal that is now seen as unreachable with current economic activity projections. Ignorance and greed have brought us here - all current and future generations will now pay for this nationalistic military-industrial mess the elites have brought upon us.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> <strong>Systemic Disorder – Multiple Failure </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Realism is a compass for action, and now we have seen how the post-Covid green recovery has been constructed, business as usual will clearly be the norm and is just as clearly a function of the short-sighted, opportunistic and individualistic thinking and value systems of the international capitalist order. But like all large-scale systems, the new world order is in disorder, and the collapse of finance capitalism in the background of CoP 27 is the elephant in the room, droned out by multimedia news speak now focused on the Ukraine war, taking our eyes of the ball of the 1% war financiers and families lending fortunes to governments at eye-watering interest rates we taxpayers pick up the double bill for.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><img style="width: 769px; height: 433px; margin: 0px auto; display: block;" src="/images/picture7.png" width="604" height="340" /><em>The CoPs do produce a wealth of positive stakeholder contributions that show we have the practical solutions but not the political will.</em></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><em> </em>With an alternative green and inclusive 2030 social vision in the making in the face of 2050 near future catastrophe, in the midst of an structural economic reformation with wholesale loss of jobs, collapse of smaller businesses, lack of economic prospects and finally loss of hope, at a point of an inflationary cost of living crisis, who can pay attention to ensuring life is carbon neutral? That’s way too existential for 8 billion people. So a hot, flat and crowded future looms inevitably as we look away distractedly and drive the family car down a crowded highway, or take the latest cheap flight hotel deal in a last chance sea-side doomed destination …</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> <strong>The Cost of Greenwash and Inaction and Benefits for the Few</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Where, if we can afford to get to such a Mediterranean or tropical paradise, we can for instance ask the Bahamas minister of tourism, who reported to CoP that now 50% of debt servicing is because of hurricane damage to the islands. The upheaval of coastal lands across the globe, where 80% of tourism is conducted, will not only impact the territories where sea level, aridification and extreme weather and the knock on effects of migration, resource conflict and barbarism arise, but also impact the overall international tourism order, where entitlement to travel our one planet should be the right of all 8 billion of us … not just the privileged travelling billion whose access to the money economy ensures 3 – 7 star mobility for the westernised (Americanised) urban masses.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> <img style="width: 891px; height: 501px; margin: 0px;" src="/images/picture8.png" width="530" height="298" /></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><em>Summing it up – here are our fearless leaders fighting for the planet or over the planet? - representatives of the multinational corporate and financial planetary owners – no changes to the status quo please on their watch ... </em></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><em>NB there are 4 women in this picture</em></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">And within that billion, the 1% themselves, running up a luxury travel carbon footprint that makes all the difference to SDG targets, but is still off limits to the greening of the sector, where the joined up governance of socio-economic and environmental concerns is politically and bureaucratically kept purely theoretical and there isn’t even a decent set of management and measurement tools to monitor the process of tourism sector projected emissions rise by 25% by 2030 according to the UN-WTO – unless we do something of course. Future CoPs will have to address root inequality and climate catastrophe as a whole very soon ..</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> <img style="width: 790px; height: 445px; margin: 0px auto; display: block;" src="/images/picture9.png" width="524" height="295" /></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><em>Getting down to business as usual in the tourism sector – the Glasgow Declaration one year on</em></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> <strong>Tourism Stakeholders moving forward from Glasgow</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">This CoP 27 did address the role of tourism stakeholders by revisiting the CoP 26 Glasgow Declaration, which started a year ago with about 170 signatories and has now reached 700. Examples of various stakeholder actions largely recount some project experiences or renewed policy and research initiatives, but – as with the overall CoP sector performance plans – such stories at best indicate isolated well-meaning actions in a sea of mean common problems whose real solutions are complex and systemic, not coincidental and simplistic.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> <strong>The Vision of Tourism SCP Supply Chains as the key to Overall Sustainable Development</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">If the tourism sector is to be seen as the vector that can create the local-regional- national- international sustainable supply chains of the global economy for the movement of people as travellers for both business and leisure, and if that system is made inclusive and affordable to the 8 billion for free global circulation and all the trade and exchange that creates, then tourism stakeholders - through a clear vision and fair value system and smart collaborative networking - can create a global to local sustainable consumption and production platform of interest to all who would be part of such interconnected yet regionally resilient development and trade processes.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> The UNWTO has recognised the need and opportunity to grow such a network of businesses and destinations who can be part of a greener global business web, and the EU are hailing the clustering of regional sectoral activity to improve SME and territorial resilience to chart a course through this fast-moving epoch of Global Change. The Covid horror show revealed the inherent weakness of an international travel and transport economy. Yet we are back to business as usual – the Ukraine War as a point in case -, counting the greenbacks instead of greening our backyards, dollar conscious in an age when its water that precious.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The need for tourism stakeholders to support initiatives such as the Glasgow Declaration arises not just because the travel and tourism sector is a considerable contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and needs to reduce its impacts on both climate and biodiversity, but more importantly because the sector has the ability to create a cross sector matrix of green product and services suppliers that would form a socio-economic, environmental and cultural in regions where travel and tourism works. Reducing the negative and creating positive changes makes the greening of tourism sector supply chains a no brainer when it comes to recovery and resilience thinking, planning, investment and implementation and then monitoring.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> <img style="width: 801px; height: 542px; margin: 0px auto; display: block;" src="/images/picture10.png" width="392" height="265" /></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><em>Seeking to measure carbon reduction implementation in the tourism sector – a small-scale demonstration of what needs to be upscaled immediately.</em></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> Such a cycle has been applied to the European Tourism Going Green 2030 project support for SMEs and destinations who wish to develop sustainable tourism supply chains. <em>Ecotrans</em> and <em>Mirabilia</em>, two signatories to the Declaration, are part of the project and have joined forces to set up a small demonstration project monitoring carbon emissions from tourism stakeholders to test current tools and establish a long term system that enables multi-stakeholder approaches to emissions reduction.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">In the greening of tourism to support adaptation and mitigation (don’t give up on 1.5 just yet!) access to finance for sustainability certification is the key to making sustainable and responsible tourism goods and services visible and transparent enough for trusted trading on both a b2 b and b2c basis. 3<sup>rd</sup> Party certification is necessary to cut through the green washing, and the Tourism 2030 has the world’s largest listing of 3<sup>rd</sup> party sustainably certified tourism businesses. A going green self-assessment and then sustainability certification support service has been added to the portal to enable either SMEs or destinations to join the market place and put themselves into local to global sustainable tourism market chains.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> Finally, if such thinking is applied to those precious and priceless protected area landscapes and habitats that house the fragile remains of our invaluable planetary biodiversity, then we can meet both the climate stabilization and biodiversity conservation targets (SDGs 13,14 and 15) together and where it counts most i.e. in the most vulnerable eco-systems which are usually under most human development pressure. If we put the resources and people in to get tourism right in these places – and every country has them and should prioritize their protection – then we would quickly build a local to global network of supply chains interlinked by the value system of sustainability and trading on this (externally verified!) trust in order that responsible consumers and responsible producers understand what is sustainable and make their economic choices accordingly, to the benefit of both supplier and consumer.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify;">For further information on the ETGG 2030 Going Green Project please see</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a href="/etgg2030">https://destinet.eu/etgg2030</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">For information on the Mirabilia Ecotrans Demonstration project on Carbon Emissions Measurements please see</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a href="/who-who/civil-society-ngos/mirabilia-ecotrans-glasgow-declaration/">https://destinet.eu/who-who/civil-society-ngos/mirabilia-ecotrans-glasgow-declaration/</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">A Global Sustainability Clustering Meeting is being held on Wednesday November 30<sup>th</sup> should you wish to become involved – please contact <a href="mailto:Gordon.destinet@ecotrans.de">Gordon.destinet@ecotrans.de</a> or see <a href="/who-who/civil-society-ngos/travel-green-planet-2030-initiative">https://destinet.eu/who-who/civil-society-ngos/travel-green-planet-2030-initiative</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The previous article in this series can be found at <em>(see <a href="/News/2022/11/cop-out-27-in-the-winter-of-2022-a-global-policy-journey-going-green-2030">https://destinet.eu/News/2022/11/cop-out-27-in-the-winter-of-2022-a-global-policy-journey-going-green-2030</a>)</em></p>
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<p style="text-align: justify;">Gordon Sillence is ICT Director of the Tourism 2030 Portal managed by the Ecotrans European Network for Sustainable Tourism Development. Please contact <a href="mailto:Gordon.destinet@ecotrans.de">Gordon.destinet@ecotrans.de</a></p>
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