Environmental management in tourism sector: good practices and opportunities

It is widely recognised the multimodal relationship between tourism and environment. Environment represents the core of touristic activities given that we organize tourism where we recognise a certain level of attractiveness. Environment is considered as the wide set of natural, anthropologic, economic, social and cultural factors that characterized a touristic area and represents the habitat in which the touristic attraction can be valued or, on the opposite, depreciated. Sometimes attractiveness has been sacrificed in the name of tourism industry expansion and thus long term development potential. In fact, every tourist activity is strictly intertwined with the ecosystem in which it takes place so that the protection of the environment is motivated by the need to preserve the stock of natural resources that allows touristic companies to achieve relevant economic and competitive results and,at the same time,compromising this asset can imply the loss of all touristic attraction,damaging the whole sector. These considerations show that touristic activities, more than others, need to couple economic development with environmental safeguarding and, as consequence, the necessity for tourism activities to be converted in a more ecologica lway. From1995,year of the publication of the Lanzarote chart,the document which opens a serious debate on sustainable tourism,several initiatives have been carried out in this field. The discussion on this issue resulted in the proliferation of awards,labels and initiatives that rarely represented a concrete answer to the problem. Both the lack of information about environmental impact of tourism and the little attention on the problem showed by tourists represented an obstacle to the development of an efficient integrated approach. Infact,tourism suffers from the problem of indirect impact; in this sense the role of tourists is crucial in order to answer the environmental problem in a positive way. Infact,in general terms,tourists are worried about environmental problems but do not realize the considerable importance of their daily purchasing habits in terms of contributing to the problem,and therefore do not change them. At the same time,most of environmental impact on tourism depends on tourists’ behaviour. Tourists are, contemporary, recipients of environmental policies and partner in their implementation. In the recent years, the tourism sector experienced new form of environmental management thanks also to the development of environmental management tools such as Eu-Ecolabel. The aim of this paper is to make a literature review about environmental management in tourism sector and to analyze the environmental improvement and the new opportunities linked to adoption of EU-Ecolabel. According to literature review, managing a facility in compliance with Ecolabel standards today is an example of innovative hote lmanagement. Infact,EU-Ecolabel sets specific criteria for tourism aimed at stimulating the adoption of best practices in the environmental management of touristic activities. The establishment of best practices is best shown by EU-Ecolabel tourist accommodation services than non- EU-Ecolabel ones. This means that the implementation of EU-Ecolabel criteria plays an important role in determining both the environmental performance of a touristic activity and tourists’involvement.