Afbeelding
Motivation
Sustainable development is high on local, national and international political agendas. Just think of climate change, biodiversity, the nitrogen pollution crisis, the health crisis, the loss of tranquil and quiet areas, and the development of the circular economy.
The Leisure, Tourism and Hospitality (LTH) sector performs a double function in this process. On the one hand, it creates value from natural resources such as the quality of nature, biodiversity, landscape, tranquillity, clean air, and cultural heritage. On the other hand, the hospitality sector has an impact on climate change, nitrogen oxides, loss of biodiversity and tranquillity, and increasingly on local communities in destinations. The hospitality sector sometimes leads the way in providing solutions to crises, but in many cases also lags behind. A patent example is carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions which are slowly decreasing in most sectors but still growing in LTH.
Objective
This project aims to draw up a research agenda for a more sustainable tourism sector. This agenda offers a systematic overview of relevant policy and issues, and a translation into potential research questions.
The challenge is to find, in line with the practice of the sector, not only economic models and paradigms, but also actions and adjustments that effectively reduce the environmental burden of the sector by responding adequately to the new and rapidly changing policies on these topics while maintaining an economically healthy sector. This will include a focus on the role of digitalisation in both the emergence of the issues and their resolution.
As a follow-up to the Research Agenda, NBTC and CELTH have joined forces to develop - in the run-up to the Tourism Summit in 2022 - a Roadmap Duurzame Bestemming Nederland (Roadmap for the Netherlands as a Sustainable Destination), in cooperation with various parties from the tourism world and partners from different sections of society.
In this Roadmap we will not only describe the challenges for the sector and what is already being done to address those various challenges, but we will mainly also identify the existing obstacles and how we can tackle these together.
Approach
Based on relevant sustainability themes (climate, energy, air, water, sound, biodiversity, safety, landscape, use of space, waste, circular economy, SDGs, and overtourism), this project will initially report on national and international policy by theme (in the form of a literature review). In a later phase, interviews with relevant stakeholders (sector and government organisations and companies) will follow. The researchers thus wish to gain insight into the challenges and bottlenecks faced by the subsectors of the leisure industry with respect to the 13 sustainability themes identified in the literature review. These interviews will be analysed in outline form and compiled into a report with a subsequent sustainability research agenda.
Partners
- Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy
- VNG (Association of Netherlands Municipalities)
- IPO (Association of Provincial Authorities)
- Gastvrij Nederland (Hospitable Netherlands) / sector organisations
- NBTC (Netherlands Board of Tourism & Conventions)
Project team
- Paul Peters (BUas / CSTT)
- Eke Eijgelaar (BUas / CSTT)
- Harald Buijtendijk (BUas / CSTT)
- Elena Cavagnaro (NHL Stenden)
- Tamina Reinecke (BUas)
Planning
May 2021 – September 2022
Status
Research completed.
Downloads
The report 'Sustainable Research Agenda for Leisure, Tourism and Hospitality' can be downloaded free of charge from the CELTH site. Or look online at the presentation that Harald Buijtendijk gave at the inspiration session of the Trend Congress. You can read the background article on the NRIT-site (in Dutch).