How can the hospitality industry accelerate a sustainable future?

The Sustainability Research Agenda is being developed by CELTH as part of the Actieagenda Perspectief 2030 Bestemming Nederland (Action Agenda Perspective 2030 Destination the Netherlands). The Sustainability Research Agenda forms a prelude to the Roadmap for Sustainable Destinations, which NBTC is working on together with CELTH. This roadmap stresses the importance and urgency of making the sector more sustainable. They aim to present this roadmap at the very next Tourism Summit in Flevoland in September 2022.

Sustainable development is high on national and international political agendas. With the climate crisis, nitrogen crisis and health crisis, the loss of silence, unequal distribution of wealth and extreme poverty, the urgency for a circular economy with zero emissions is stronger than ever before. The tourism, hospitality & recreation industry (THR) plays a double role here: on the one hand, it creates value from natural resources, such as nature quality, the climate, biodiversity, landscape, silence, clean air and cultural heritage. On the other hand, the THR sector negatively impacts these resources and, to an increasing extent, local communities and tourists at destinations. The THR sector is sometimes a front runner in offering solutions, but is also lagging behind in many cases. Where, for example, carbon dioxide emissions are slowly falling in most industries, those in the THR industry are still showing an upward trend.

Aligning with Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations

CELTH is developing a research agenda for making the hospitality sector more sustainable. This agenda systematically lists the relevant policy and issues, and translates them into possible research questions. This agenda is one of the action points from the Actieagenda van Perspectief Bestemming Nederland 2030 providing a new benchmark. This is the widely supported vision of the hospitality sector for the future. The Council for the Environment and Infrastructure advised guiding the relation between tourism and the environment - with the future in mind - in its publication Valuable Tourism: our Environment Deserves it. The research agenda that is now being developed by order of the Taskforce Hospitality Sector is in line with the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations.

Foundations laid for research agenda

Phase 1 – the literature review – has meanwhile been finalised. This literature review dealing with 13 sustainability themes mapped out national and international policy as well as its impact on the tourism industry and its relation with the SDGs. In this way, it lays the foundation for the research agenda. Questions that arise from the literature review are:

• How is tourism being influenced by circular changes?
• How are tourism enterprises implementing current policy and current legislation in the field of environmental and climate issues?
• What are tourism enterprises and destinations doing to prepare for the changing demand?
• What are tourism enterprises and destinations doing to prepare for changing travel circumstances, including a possible contraction?
• How can tourism co-create policy for a more resilient, innovative and sustainable future?

Anticipating a rapidly changing environment

Researchers consider it a challenge to not only identify economic models and (growth) paradigms, but also determine actions and adjustments which effectively reduce the negative ecological and social effects of the sector. All this in a rapidly changing (international) policy environment, maintaining an economically sound sector, which, at the same time, needs to switch over to a circular business model. In research phase 2, interviews will be held with stakeholders from all THR subsectors, in which they will identify issues and research questions regarding the 13 themes.

Read more?

Part 1 of the Literature Review of Themes, Policies and Impact can be downloaded.