Sustainable Tourism on a Finite Planet ─ Environmental, Business and Policy Solutions

 Sustainable Tourism on a Finite Planet challenges readers to consider the new skills, tools and investments required to protect irreplaceable global resources from the impacts of escalating tourism demand in the next 50 years. This volume documents how technology is driving a travel revolution and propelling the growing global middle class to take leisure trips at unprecedented rates. Travel and tourism supply chains and business models for hotels, tour operators, cruise lines, airlines and airports are described with key environmental management techniques for each sector.

This book recommends that decision makers assess the current and future value of natural, social and cultural capital to guide investment in destinations and protect vital resources. Case studies illustrate why budgets to protect local destinations are consistently underestimated and offer guidance on new metrics.Innovative approaches are proposed to support the transition to green infrastructure, protect incomparable landscapes, and engage local people in the monitoring of vital indicators to protect local resources.

Sustainable Tourism on a Finite Planet provides students, professionals and policy makers with far reaching recommendations for new educational programs, professional expertise, financing, and legal frameworks to lower tourism’s rapidly escalating carbon impacts and protect the health and well-being of local populations, ecosystems, cultures and monuments worldwide.

Megan Epler Wood founded and led The International Ecotourism Society (TIES) from 1990 to 2002. She is the Director of the International Sustainable Tourism Initiative at the Center for Health and the Global Environment, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, an instructor of online courses in sustainable tourism at Harvard Extension’s Graduate School of Sustainability, and a Senior Project Associate at the Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise, Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. Her consulting practice EplerWood International fosters sustainable tourism development in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.