Protecting Colombia’s Natural Heritage
Through Sustainable Travel: Lessons From the Pandemic. After three years of struggle, we see a strong comeback in the sector, demonstrating its incredible resilience.
Due to the pandemic, in the blink of an eye, tourism went from a booming industry worldwide, accounting for 10.6% of the world's jobs and 10.4% of global GDP, to an industry in crisis. However, after three years of struggle, we see a strong comeback in the sector, demonstrating its incredible resilience.
*In December 2022, Julian assumed the Chief of Party role at DAI for USAID Colombia Destination Nature Activity. He is no longer affiliated with WhereNext.
The question that we should ask ourselves is if we are going back to the 2019 version of tourism or if we are going to learn the lessons from the pandemic and aim at reinventing/reimagining the tourism of the future.
This is a crucial question because far from being the "smokeless" industry, meaning that it has no environmental impact, tourism has massive negative externalities that affect both the people and the planet.
Today, greenhouse emissions from tourism are between 5 and 8% and are estimated to grow to 21% in 2030. Tourists use 25% more energy than locals, increasing by 164% in 2050. A tourist consumes four times more water than locals, and that number will increase by 92% in 2050. Hotels waste between 12 and 30% of the food they prepare and dispose of around 8 million tons of plastic waste. Close to 1,800 species of plants and animals are at risk due to tourism activities.
Are we going to be a part of the problem of current global environmental challenges, or are we going to be a part of the solution?
Colombia is a great local example of the dilemma faced by the global tourism industry today. To put things in perspective, Colombia is a country the size of Spain, France, and Portugal combined. Yet while we have a population of 51 million inhabitants and international visitors grew to 4.5 million in 2019, these three countries have a population of 125 million and received 201 million tourists in 2019. So, on paper, Colombia has the potential to grow 50 times its current number of travelers, create thousands of jobs, and generate millions of dollars in income.
But the question is, at what cost to the environment? What type of tourism do we want for one of the most biodiverse countries on earth?
There is no black-and-white answer to this question. Instead, it requires a more nuanced response. We must find a middle ground that allows Colombia to reap the enormous benefits that tourism can bring while ensuring that we protect the biodiversity that makes us unique.
That is precisely what I set out to do as Colombia's Vice-minister of Tourism. While adopting the short-term mitigation measures necessary to alleviate the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in the tourism sector, I designed and started implementing a long-term strategy to put sustainability at the heart of the Colombian tourism industry. Instead of postponing policies that enhance long-term sustainability and resilience, crises can be an opportunity to rethink and act.
The foundation of this strategy was to adopt a multi-stakeholder approach to ensure that everybody could contribute to being part of the solution to the environmental challenges the tourism industry faces today. Even though the strategy has many components, I would like to highlight five of them.
First, we published Colombia's Sustainable Tourism Policy. We took over a year to do the research, reviewing all the best practices worldwide, to finally come up with what is today probably the most complete sustainable tourism policy in the world. It includes six strategies related to information, governance, investment and innovation, sustainable supply, responsible demand, and positioning. It has 14 programs, 32 projects, and 140 action lines. It has been translated into English and is freely available for download.
Second, we presented a sustainable tourism bill to the Colombian Congress. It was approved in record time with the participation of all political parties, even those from the opposition.
It is the only tourism law that I know of that includes an article stating that tourism activities must aim to conserve nature and be carried out without deteriorating the environment.
It combines the carrot and the stick, incentives and sanctions related to sustainable tourism practices and innovative tools for conservation, such as those related to "carrying capacity." The UNWTO defines this as "the maximum number of people that may visit a tourist destination at the same time, without destroying the physical, economic, socio-cultural environment and an unacceptable decrease in the quality of visitors' satisfaction."
A more modern and complementary tool to reduce the impact on the environment is called "limits of acceptable change," which consists of determining what impacts from tourism activities are acceptable and designing management measures to ensure those changes are not exceeded.
An example of a family who are benefitting from sustainable tourism in Colombia’s isolated Montes de Maria region. We worked with this family on a project with Awake Travel and USAID
But the Policy and the Law were not enough if they were simply going to be nice documents gathering dust on a bookshelf. This is why we created a third component.
We needed to facilitate implementation by destinations, businesses, and communities. Therefore we created an implementation platform that included a sustainability handbook for business entrepreneurs and a digital platform with tools for policy implementation containing podcasts, videos, infographics, questionnaires, and an online contact line for one-to-one advice by experts.
The results:
2.409 registered users
1.553 active entrepreneurs
823 users with characterization surveys finalized
43 certified users
This is already a great result, but more outreach work is still required.
In addition to these elements of the strategy and to make it easier for communities and people who are just starting to venture into tourism, we published a set of six sustainability best practices guides as a fourth component. This included a general guide and five specialist guides on gastronomy, travel agencies, transportation, accommodation, and guiding.
Finally, as a fifth component of the strategy, we developed and published an Illustrated Handbook for Nature Guides in Colombia. It includes print and digital versions of the Handbook in English and Spanish, 50 podcasts, and 100 infographics for smartphones. It is organized into chapters related to i) the nature guide, ii) key concepts, iii) Colombia as a megadiverse country, iv) diverse landscapes, and; v) biological heritage.
This is especially important in a country like Colombia, one of the 17 megadiverse countries globally, which contains almost 20% of the birds on the planet and more than 90 different types of ecosystems.
The only way to protect that heritage is to educate people to create a deep sense of belonging and commitment.
There are six key takeaways from this experience of creating a comprehensive sustainable tourism strategy:
Crises bring tremendous opportunities. The focus by Congress on short-term measures allowed me to pass more critical long/term legislation that would not have been possible in different circumstances.
Clarity of purpose, perseverance, and patience are crucial to adopting policy and law. Don't give up!
Dive deep into the issues. The devil is in the details.
Ideas must come at the right time. Learn to read the signs.
Listen to everybody, but make your own decisions.
Build a strong and cohesive team and give them credit for their work.
An example of one of the 100 digital factsheets created alongside the Illustrated Handbook for Nature Guides in Colombia, which are free to download.
Let me conclude with a final idea of what I believe will be an essential part of the future of tourism.
Travel is not only about transporting yourself to a destination. It is also about the inner journey you undertake inspired by the places you visit. And the secret of great travel is connecting the outer journey with the inner journey to make it a unique, memorable, and transformative experience. So we are moving from travel as entertainment to travel as an enriching experience.
Many people visit the same places, but all have an entirely different experience: focus on travelers' minds and hearts. As a result, those of us working in tourism have an opportunity to shape the sector to be enriching for both travelers and locals, no matter the context of the destination.
Henry Miller was right when he said: "One's destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things."
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