Last Updated on June 28, 2025
Travel brings many incredible benefits to individual travelers as well as local communities. But it can also threaten the preservation of our planet’s nature, culture, and history.
With travel becoming increasingly accessible, the need for sustainable tourism is becoming more urgent, because there are both pros and cons of tourism.
Many of us, particularly those of us in the western hemisphere, have travel privileges that enable us to travel the planet easier than ever before. For example, budget airlines have made it simple to book a quick weekend away in another country or city.
Because of this growing travel accessibility, it’s important that we acknowledge and address the impact that travel has on natural environments, wildlife, local communities, culture, heritage, and economies. This is where sustainable tourism comes in.
So why is sustainable tourism important? Let’s find out.
The Impact of Tourism
Hundreds of millions of tourists travel every year to destinations all over the globe, and the tourism industry is a huge economic force. In 2021, the market size of tourism worldwide was estimated at approximately 1.31 trillion U.S. dollars.
Tourism is a global phenomenon, and as a result, in has both positive and negative impacts on our planet and people.
Positive Impacts of Tourism
Tourism has many benefits. It can strengthen communities by providing more income, resources, and infrastructure. It creates higher employment rates, helps preserve culture and language, and leads to more cultural understanding.
Negative Impacts of Tourism
Unfortunately, there’s a downside to tourism, too. Overtourism can impact quality of life in local communities, diminish natural resources, and cause gentrification. There can occasionally be a risk of communities becoming dependent on tourism.
Some destinations also find that tourism causes “disneyfication.” This is when cultural experiences becoming so commodified, that they are no longer authentic.
What is Sustainable Tourism?
The World Tourism Organization defines sustainable tourism as tourism that takes full account of its current and future economic, social and environmental impacts, addressing the needs of visitors, the industry, the environment and host communities.
In short, sustainable tourism acknowledges the harms of the tourism industry, and aims to create models of tourism that protect people and the planet. It’s a solution for addressing the negative impacts of tourism.
Why is Sustainable Tourism Important?
Sustainable tourism is important because it ensures the benefits of tourism outweigh the negatives, making tourism a positive force. With sustainable models of tourism, people, culture, heritage, language, wildlife, natural resources, our environment, and everything else that makes this planet special are protected.
Sustainable travel means committing to traveling in a way that has the least impact possible. With this approach to tourism, we can reduce the effects of overtourism, support local and Indigenous communities, protect natural resources and wildlife, and more.
Sustainable tourism helps every tourist become a more responsible traveler, and it provides an opportunity to give back to the regions and communities that we visit.
Types of Sustainable Tourism
The term “sustainable” is often associated specifically with environmental concerns, because it’s a term that’s used when talking about solutions for our climate crisis. But in the context of tourism, sustainability isn’t just about nature and wildlife. It also includes people, culture, and social issues.
It’s helpful to break down global sustainable tourism into these two categories: Environmental, and socio-cultural.
Environmental
A 2018 study by Nature Climate Change found that tourism accounts for 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions. This is a significant amount of impact, and that’s why environmental sustainable tourism is so important.
The environmental type of sustainable tourism focuses on protecting wildlife from the impact of tourism, increasing wildlife conservation, protecting the habitats of wildlife, creating protected natural areas, and ensuring natural resources aren’t diminishing because of tourism.
Socio-Cultural
Socio-cultural sustainable tourism is focused on maintaining (and improving!) the quality of life of people in tourist destinations, ensuring culture and language is protected, and conserves natural heritage and heritage sites. It’s about making sure local communities are actually benefiting from tourism, economically and socially.
Both environmental and socio-cultural concerns factor into sustainable tourism. Together, they ensure people and the planet are benefiting from tourism rather than hurting from it.
5 Reasons Sustainable Tourism is Important
1. Creates better experiences for all.
Through sustainable tourism, both travelers and locals in the visited destinations will have a better experience. This is because the focus of sustainable travel is on creating a positive, and regenerative impact, while minimizing the harmful impacts of travel.
As a result, locals will tangibly benefit from tourism, and visitors with have more authentic and meaningful experiences on their travels.
2. Sustinable tourism reduces overtourism.
Overtourism is when there are too many tourists in one place at a time. It can have detrimental effects on places, as well as the people that visit them.
For example, crowds can reduce the quality of life for both local people and tourists, and overtourism can also create economic dependence on tourism.
Reducing overtourism through government policies and marketing leads to better balance, and also encourages tourists to explore areas outside of the popular tourist hotspots.
3. Protects natural environments and supports conservation.
When tourists want to visit a natural area, there’s motivation and means to protect that area. For example, Algonquin Provincial Park leverages funds earned through tourism to support conservation and protection of the park and it’s wildlife.
Tourism incentives both governments and organizations to institute environmentally focused policies, as well as conservation measures. This can include creating national parks, nature reserves, and other protected areas.
Conservation around the globe also encourages better treatment of animals and wildlife in the tourism industry.
As people become more informed about responsible wildlife tourism, tourism is shifting away from interactive wildlife experiences to observation-only experiences. This helps ensure that wild animals get to stay wild.
4. Sustainable tourism supports local communities.
One of the greatest benefits of tourism is economic. Both small communities and entire countries can benefit a lot from the money brought in by tourism.
For example, it’s expected that in 2023, Portugal’s GDP could reach almost €39.5 billion, representing 17.4% of the whole economy. This contribution leads to wider benefits for a community and country.
Economic gains from tourism can help support infrastructure in a community and across a country, support more resources for locals, and in general improve the quality of life of those locals.
5. Fosters learning and cultural understanding.
Sustainable tourism aims to create a positive relationship between communities and the people who visit them. This can lead to tons of great benefits.
For locals and tourists alike, interaction through tourism fosters learning. Both get to learn about eachother’s cultures, practices, and norms.
This creates a mutual cultural understanding, and can also help to eradicate cultural biases and ethnocentrism, as well as problematic cultural appropriation.
The learning also extends to practical knowledge! Travelers can use tourism as an opportunity to learn history, politics, and the world’s dynamics.
Developing Sustainable Tourism
Who’s responsibility is it to develop sustainable tourism? It falls on the mixture of players that create the tourism industry across the globe. This includes governments, tourism boards, tourism operators, marketers, airlines and more.
Developing sustainable tourism starts with information. To create sustainable models, players across the industry need to be well informed about sustainability issues, and how to address them.
Some strategies that the travel industry can use in working toward sustainable tourism include tax incentives for switching over to carbon neutral solutions, controlling volume of entry into popular sites, and marketing campaigns that emphasize lesser-known destinations.
There should also be incentives for developing sustainable tourism. This can come in the form of governmental policy, but incentives can also be driven by tourists.
For example, if more and more tourists choose hotels that are eco-conscious, the hotel industry will recognize that sustainability is important to travelers, incentivizing more hotels to shift toward eco practices.
Achieving sustainable tourism is a slow and continuous process that needs the participation of everyone who is involved in the tourism industry, or adjacent to it.
How to be a Sustainable Tourist
Building sustainable tourism models requires work from the travel industry itself. But individual tourists can definitely help!
1. Vote for sustainable tourism with your dollars.
As a tourist, you’re able to influence the travel industry by voting with your dollars. This means making a point to spend your money on hotels, tours, experiences, and transport that are committed to sustainability.
Before booking accomodation or tour operators, do some research. Look to see if there’s any public mention of sustainable practices on their website, and read reviews to get a sense of what other travelers have observed.
For example, if you’re renting a vehicle for your trip, see if there’s the option to rent an electric vehicle. By choosing electric cars whenever possible, you send the signal that there’s demand for electric cars over gas cars.
2. Amplify sustainable travel issues and advocate for solutions.
Making sustainability part of the tourism conversation is a simple thing to do, and it helps! Talking about sustainable tourism brings wider awareness, which encourages more travelers to make sustainable tourism choices.
And, it further emphasizes to companies and organizations in the tourism industry that sustainable tourism is essential, and worth investing in.
3. Practice sustainability on your own travels.
There are simple things that every person can do on their own travels to help reduce their impact. Like mentioned above, start by booking the most sustainable options for flights, hotels, tour operators, etc.
From there, minimize your short haul flights, travel lightly, pack zero-waste and reusable toiletries, and use a water filtration system to avoid buying bottled water.
Read: 12 detailed sustainable tourism tips for travelers.
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More from Pina Travels:
- How to be a Responsible Tourist (+20 Responsible Travel Tips!)
- Your Guide to Unpacking Travel Privilege
- How to Avoid Contributing to Overtourism
- 10 Helpful Tips For Responsible Wildlife Tourism
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