What is the opportunity of regenerative tourism?
In our final Connectle conversation of 2019, I had a great opportunity to talk about the potential of regenerative tourism with three leading lights of the industry; leading speaker Anna Pollock, marketing director of Visit Flanders Elke Dens, and Tina O’Dwyer head of The Tourism Space in Ireland.
The tourism industry is estimated to be worth $8.8billion per anuum, accounts for 1 in every 10 jobs around the world, and last year transported 1.3billion people to global destinations. This is expected to reach 1.8 billion a year by 2030, according to the latest UNWTO predictions and will be alongside a further 15.6 billion domestic journeys.
On a finite planet under existential threat, that no longer seems sustainable, and yet the tourism industry continues to grow at a pace that outstrips the global rate of growth for almost any other industry at 3.9% per annum. We had a change to explore what could be different about tourism if regenerative culture were applied to the industry.
What does regenerative mean vs sustainable tourism?
Sustainable tourism first appeared on the horizon about 10–15 years ago, and is the concept of visiting somewhere as a tourist and trying to make a positive impact on the environment, society, and economy. The World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) describes sustainable tourism as “development that meets the needs of present tourists and host regions while protecting and enhancing opportunities for the future. It is envisaged as leading to management of all resources in such a way that economic, social and aesthetic needs can be fulfilled while maintaining cultural integrity, essential ecological processes, biological diversity, and life support systems”.
Regenerative culture and design is a very recent and emergent set of principles and ideals about where sustainability, the circular economy could move next. Despite the fact that the original intent in the Brundtland Report was for sustainability to encompass both planetary and human wellbeing, sustainability has mainly focused on the upstream impact of business. Regenerative culture takes a much more holisitic approach to combining human wellbeing with the wellbeing of the entire ecosystem in which humans live, mainly through the principles of living systems theory.
Regenerative tourism is a step further forward in sustainability thinking, according to Anna Pollock. “After the global financial crisis in 2008, I began looking at the accelerating impact of growing global tourism beyond sustainable tourism — which is only even now beginning to become a mainstream idea. The way in which we have designed the tourism business model is based on our known business-as-usual model. Sustainable tourism, which has been marginal untl the last 5 years, has been about doing tourism better with less impact but still using the business model. It is a greener, cleaner less harmful version of business-as-usual.”
“ Regenerative tourism is bolder and more inspiring. It aims not just to do less harm, but to go on and restore the harm that our system has already done to the natural world, and by using nature’s principles, to create the conditions of life to flourish. It views wholes and not parts, and is a very different way of looking at the world.”
Elke Dens, Marketing Director of Visit Flanders talked about tourism strategy as being a place-based stategy, where destinations were rewarded by politicians for driving growth in visitor numbers. “We only saw the positive effects of tourism, of what we did at first” explained Elke. “But eventually we saw the negative impact for people and place of continually increasing the volume of tourists. When you realise you are no longer creating true value, you know you have to change something. Marketing is really about creating value, so as place-marketeers, we are now looking to create value beyond economic growth.”
Tina O’Dwyer has piloted regenerative programmes at The Burren in west Ireland. “The whole idea of regenerative tourism is very new. In the last year sustainable tourism has taken centre stage, and the industry is trying to work on that. The discussion of regeneration which goes beyond sustaining what’s there is very fresh. In the West of Ireland there was a pilot programme funded by the EU on tourism for conservation — how tourism could contribute to conservation. We didn’t’ call it regenerative tourism at the time, but the principles and values were moving towards that. A collaborative partnership between national bodies, agencies and local communites were able to achieve a lot compared to other parts of the industry and gave us an indication of what might be achieved through a different approach.”
Key differentiators is that the current view of tourism is based on the industrial mechanical production model that sees everything as parts — the environment is a siloed thing, a challenge. But we are not economic units of production; we’re alive. We’re not all separate, we are all connected and interdependent. Regenerative transcends sustainability. The UN SDGs for example were presented in 17 separate boxes as if you could pick and choose the SDG that suited you to work on. In many ways that was useful, it encouraged people to think about how to be more sustainable, but unfortunately the Goals are all deeply interconnected.
It enables people to think they can be more than their current potential; it enables us to regenerate the land, the biodiversity; it enables us to create a different experience.
Language is also important in driving change; a new language is emerging alongside the idea of regenerative culture. Flourishing, thriving, wholeness. First thinking about the thrivability of an area which people are happy to live in rather than having to periodically seek that experience through travel. Integrating regional tourisms responsibility to create great places to visit with the authorities whose responsibilty it is to create great places to live. “it’s about bringing new life, and breathing new life into destinations in a holistic approach.”
What makes destinations key to the potential for regenerative tourism?
“With the Travel to Tomorrow movement, we say its the destination communities who will decide how to create value in the future,” explained Elke. Communities will determine the carrying capacity of a place. Visit Flanders defines carrying capacity as ‘caring capacity’ and is something they actively measure. They ask people in a city what the local people’s sentiment is towards tourism every two years to see if the sentiment is growing in a positive or negative way.
It is enabling them to change tourism from ‘tourism as a numerical goal’ to tourism as a means where it can really benefit the local inhabitants, the entrepreneurs and the heritage too. The region is no longer satisfied with tourists coming to the destination, they aim to provide a meaningful experience which has a capacity to transform human thinking, by seeing things differently than how you see the world in your daily environment. The region has identified three main ways in which it can provide a meaningful human experience:-
- Through a meaningful physical activity such as a mountain climb or challenge, which helps you to think differently than before through the application of effort and achievement.
- Through a meaningful environment, such as the battlefields of WW1, from which people go away touched and transformed.
- By providing a transformative experience through a meaningful encounter with locals; meeting and engaging with people from another culture, to encourage a more tolerant, resilient outook from experiencing another’s perspective.
“Originally the assumption would have been that tourism benefitted local people and places,” Tina O’Dwyer reminded us. “But somehow as the growth model gathered its own momentium, that has been forgotten where nations and destinations are pursuing their target numbers and more recently revenue. We lost sight of the community. Working to ensure there’s positive benefits for their communities, places and heritage — is missing from both traiditional and sustainable model.”
The Ecotourism project at The Burren in Ireland started by looking at traditional measures of sustainabilty such as energy ,water and waste, but soon moved to a wider Burren and Cliffs of Moher Geopark Code of Practice. The Code committed to the promotion of responsible tourism that conserves the environment and improves the well being of local people. “ We worked hard to put words on the principles: so that the community benefits as well as the visitor,” Tina points out. “Prevously the reverse happened. I our geopark, we are working together — our traditional heritage but also our intangible heritage is well understood. We integrate care for landscape, vibrant communities, strengthened livelihoods, and sustainable environmental management, expanding beyond just a green economy.”
What is the business case for regenerative tourism?
Whilst integration upstream sustainability measures and human impact seems like a no-brainer, it also needs an argument and commercial justification for moving to a regenerative model. Tourism has traditionally focused on what the regenerative community refers to the industrial model of business, contributing to GDP and growing volume numbers. At the same time as volume is going up, the price-competitive volume model — the value of the transactions per trip, or average amount spending in any destination, airlines fares — are going down. The industry is driven to continued growth because there is less value per transaction.
The key driver in this is hidden externalities that the tourism industry hasn’t had to bear. Key objectives behind the regenerative approach is to focus on the net benefit of the visitor economy to a destination. It’s in the destination where hidden externalities are having to be paid for, according to Anna. “So one of the things we are trying to get people to think about is not growing by numbers but growing by net benefit — for the indvidiauls, employee, owner, businesses as a whole — including social benefits, cultural benefits. How can tourism help an individual flourish or thrive — a word associated with things that are alive and living that is also totally comprehensive.”
Developing different metrics will also be key to embedding regenerative tourism as a complimentary alternative to sustainable tourism. In places like Finland, Wales, and New Zealand, tourism is beginning to move away from quantitative metrics towards qualitative metrics. NZ PM Jacinda Ardern has put in place policies for every ministry to contribute to wellbeing, including tourism. In Wales the Wellbeing of Future Generations Act provides a wide platform for introducing regenerative tourism. The OECD is investing in understanding how we can measure wellbeing more usefully.
Visit Flanders use qualitative metrics such as civic pride, through a net promoter score . Elke explains: “We want people to be proud of their community and to share it with the whole world. It’s important we understand where we score high and low because of our impact with local people. In previous years we only focused on tourist satisfaction because politicians expect us to deliver on quantitative metrics because they see tourism as an economic driver. We have to make them see it has a much bigger reach which is where regenerative thinking can help us.”
“We’re looking at redesigning for a positive sum game where we are not just creating value for shareholders, but striving for positive impact for the entire ecosystem and creating value for everyone at the same time.”
Visit Flanders uses the vision of a flourishing forest to develop its community and visitor model. “We explored what we could learn from the natural world, especially how forests look after all the ecosystem inhabitants which is so different from a tourism destination where there is competition one with the other.”
In regions like East Africa, where Elke is an advisor to tourism development in Uganda, she also believes the regenerative approach can also deliver what countries need in terms of economic growth but in a regenerative way. “In Uganda, tourism is an economic driver to help them develop place and bring in money. They bring in American brands such as Marriot because they believe that’s what they need to do to attract US visitors, but don’t always think about their own strengths. The real key is to help them build the capacity so that they can deliver growth on their own with their own designs, hotels, and stories to tell rather than copying the US model. That creates a regenerative economy where their people, values and culture also prospers.”
Where and why is this model beginning to flourish?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, regenerative tourism is flourishing in places where there is also a real explosion of interest in regenerative agriculture — where there are big projects on land regenerative. Projects are beginning to spring up in plaes like Mexico, acros Central America such as eco-destination Costa Rica, and Ecuador where Turismo Regenerativo has its own brand, and even university research and support. The orientaiton towards land regeneration, permaculture and a holisitic framework already has roots in these places.
Additionally the presence of lively strong indigenous communities is helping. Regenerative principles are very similar to indigenous values found around the world — the same values they have been maintaining for thousands of years. Indigenous peoples do not have a broken relationship with nature.
One of the first regions is the Bay of Plenty in New Zealand where the recent volcanic explosion on White Island occurred. Maori inflence has really shaped that development where stewardsip of the land is combined with the idea of . human development.
Challenges to regenerative tourism
The concept is not without its challenges however. Many communities have been developed based on a visitor economy and are now highly dependent on an extractive model of tourism with high impact. The collapse of Thomas Cook in the Summer of 2019 has sent shockwaves through tourism communities in destinations like Spain and the Balearics which have been heavily dependent on a numbers-driven tourist economy.
As museums and local heritage sites are moving to a more local model of stewardship and engagement — arguably the start of regenerative tourism — they begin to see tourists as a problem which creates tension between destinations and the locality. Bridgit McKenzie of Culture Declares Emergency highlighted the absolute need of the tourism industry to get on top of overall emissions first before focusing on regenerative strategies.
Flight-based tourism of any kind is under cultural pressure. Anna connects the challenges of emissions to the increased volume of traffic and hidden externalities. “We’re not paying the true price of travelling and one of the costs is the carbon price and emissions. Regenerative tourism holds fantastic potential. But as a broader community we have an immediate responsibility to reduce and sequester carbon. When we start to pay the true cost of moving 1.3 trillion people arund the world we will see an immediate change which will be fewer trips. That’s where regenerative tourism must step in to increase the human value to develop and flourish, of those trips.”
The future
Every single sector of the economy is going through a shift towards a regenerative approach, questioning how regenerative, holisitc communites exist. “The role that tourism is playing is not just to turn them into a tourism attraction but to provide opportunities for people living in extractive economy to live regeneratively. Ideally those destinations embracing regenerative culture can demonstrate that and provide opportunities for others in our industry to come and see it. In many ways its going back to the roots of the words we use: hospitality — make people whole again; recreation — re-creation. Helping people to understand how nature works is transformative and real. What we are trying to do is raise awareness into the consciousnes of the industry to find that its real purpose in life is not just to turn a buck but to make people and the land, well again.” Anna Pollock.
My Guests
Anna Pollock, who also writes for Activate The Future, has long been an advocate of transformational change in the tourism industry and is a regular speaker all around the world.
Elke Dens is the award-winning Marketing Director of Visit Flanders and creator of Travel to Tomorrow conference held in Belgium this year.
Tina O’Dwyer runs The Tourism Space and has been an integral lead in develop The Burren ecological concept.
You can find more of our Connectle conversations on regenerative business here.
