Sustainability soon to be standard for global tourism

The United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) is on its way to set sustainability as a standard to shape the global tourism sector.

In a statement,the UNWTO said its so called Measuring the Sustainability of Tourism (MST) initiative is on track with the aim of getting adopted as the third international standard on tourism statistics after successful pilot studies to produce credible and comparable data.

The group of experts creating a statistical framework for Measuring the Sustainability of Tourism met to establish the MST initiative’s major goals for 2019,“the UNWTO said.

“The initiative is creating a draft framework for a data standard for tourism’s impact on sustainability and plans to have it adopted as the third international standard on tourism statistics by the UN Statistics Commission (UNSC),” it said.

At present, there are two existing official frameworks for measuring tourist namely the Tourism Satellite Account framework and the International Recommendations for Tourism Statistics. Both frameworks were developed by the UNWTO and proposed to UNSC.

The MST working group recently met and summarized the pilot studies done in Germany, the Philippines and Saudi Arabia to test MST’s relevance, and which have shown feasibility of the proposed framework in three different national contexts.

“This means the MST framework is on track to be prepared for submission as an international standard,” the UNWTO said.

For 2019 the MST working group has tasked itself with refining and documenting three statistically-based tourism indicators to monitor the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and their targets.