Assessing the Ecological Footprint of Ecotourism Packages: A Methodological Proposition

Tourism represents a key economic sector worldwide, constituting great leverage for local economic development but also putting noticeable environmental pressures on local natural resources. Ecotourism may be a viable alternative to mass tourism to minimize impacts on ecosystems, but it needs shared sustainability standards and monitoring tools to evaluate impacts. This paper presents a first methodological proposition to calculate the environmental impact of ecotourism packages through the use of an ad-hoc, customized version of the Ecological Footprint methodology. It follows a participatory, bottom-up approach to collecting input data for the four main services (Accommodation, Food & Drinks, Activity & Service, and Mobility & Transfer) provided to tourists through the use of surveys and stakeholders engagement. The outcome of our approach materializes in an excel-based ecotourism workbook capable of processing input data collected through surveys and returning Ecological Footprint values for specific ecotourism packages. Although applied to ecotourism in Mediterranean Protected Areas within the context of the DestiMED project, we believe that the methodology and approach presented here can constitute a blueprint and a benchmark for future studies dealing with the impact of ecotourism packages

Ecological Footprint and tourism: Development and sustainability monitoring of ecotourism packages in Mediterranean Protected Areas

Ecotourism is a potential lever for sustainable development, but common standards and approaches lack to manage and monitor the impact of defined packages on natural resources and local communities. A customized version of Ecological Footprint Accounting is evaluated here to assess its usefulness as analytical tool to quantitatively analyse the environmental pressures associated with ecotourism packages developed in and around Protected Areas in the Mediterranean Region. Within the framework of the EU-funded DestiMED project, a bottom-up, participatory approach was developed for managing and monitoring 13 ecotourism packages by involving local tourism stakeholders and service providers. The application of Ecological Footprint Accounting relied on data sourced from local service providers to complement existing statistics and datasets, and was used in an empirical iterative process to provide local tourism stakeholders with recommendations to guide them in the management of a low-impact tourism offer. International travel to and from the 13 destinations was found to place a Footprint on the environment – mainly because of carbon emissions – higher than that of the entire stay at destination. Footprint results of the packages revealed some overlooked tourism's impacts on ecosystems due to unexpected drivers, such as the Food & Drink services offered to tourists at destination. Results indicate that managing tourism product development at destination, and investing in providing knowledge on the principles of sustainability, could lower ecotourism's impacts whilst contributing to building resilience and aiding the post-COVID recovery of destinations

D5.1 Report mapping the governance status quo in pilot sites

Coastal regions provide some of the most productive and biodiverse environments with an important and often underappreciated carbon storage potential. At the same time, they are among the areas of highest population density, natural assets and cultural heritage in the world, yet are experiencing significant social, economic and environmental challenges, exacerbated by climate change and human pressures.The REST-COAST project (Large scale RESToration of COASTal ecosystems through rivers to sea connectivity) will demonstrate to what extent upscaled coastal restoration can provide a low-carbon adaptation, reducing risks and providing gains in biodiversity for vulnerable coastal ecosystems, such as wetlands or sea grass beds. By overcoming present technical, economic, governance and social barriers to restoration upscaling, REST-COAST will develop the large scale river-coast connectivity and increase the nearshore accommodation space for the resilient delivery of coastal ecosystem services (ESs). The selected ESs (risk reduction, environmental quality and fish provisioning) touch urgent coastal problems such as the erosion/flooding during recent storms or the accelerating coastal habitat degradation that seriously affects fisheries and aquaculture. Combining new techniques, risk assessments, innovative financial/governance arrangements and homogeneous metrics for ESs and biodiversity, REST-COAST will develop a systemic approach to coastal restoration based on a scalable coastal adaptation plan