- Rebound in visitors leading to unsustainable practices in some regions
- Fears Asia’s most beautiful places could become ‘the next Boracay’
- Phuket building new incinerator to cope with plastic waste
- Malaysia leveraging Indigenous-led tourism
- Nikoi and Cempedak resorts investing heavily in sustainability
The bleak pandemic years of empty deckchairs, ghost-town resorts, and thumb-twiddling masseuses are now just a bad memory for Asia’s top tourism draws. But the return of the sun-seeking masses to the world’s fastest-growing region for tourism has yielded new problems.
Popular hotspots such as Phuket, Bali and Kyoto in Japan have promoted themselves under the banner of sustainable tourism as they look to recoup lost revenue and appeal to a new breed of conscious traveller that emerged post-COVID. But the rebound in visitor numbers – Asia Pacific saw a 33% hike in international arrivals last year, according to U.N. Tourism – has in some cases become unsustainable.
There are fears that some of Asia’s most beautiful places could become “the next Boracay”, the Philippines island that was closed the year before the pandemic started to allow it to recover from chronic wastewater pollution, says Jackie Ong, senior lecturer in tourism and hospitality management at RMIT University in Vietnam.
Thailand, which saw 35.6 million visitors last year, says it is committed to balancing tourism expansion with environmental responsibility, and has taken steps to ban single use plastics in national and regional parks, and close some parks to tourists to help them recover. But it is also prone to leaky waste and water management infrastructure.
Phuket, which plans to transform its old town into the country’s first carbon-neutral municipality, expects to see its only landfill overwhelmed by plastic waste this year, as littered beaches become a familiar sight on the “Pearl of the Andaman”. A new incinerator will have to be built to cope with unmanageable trash volumes, officials said in January.
On another big tourist draw, the island of Bali, the Indonesian government last year moved to set a moratorium on the construction of hotels, villas and nightclubs in some areas in a bid to counter over-development and preserve the island’s Indigenous culture – though the newly elected governor reportedly said in January that a moratorium was not needed, just stricter controls.
Megan Epler Wood, managing director of the sustainable tourism asset management program at the University of Cornell, says governments often assign responsibility for tourism to their marketing departments rather than those empowered to deal with the “invisible burden” that tourism places on energy, water, waste and culture.
What is defined as “eco-tourism” – travelling to places in ways that minimise environmental impact and benefit local communities – is projected to grow by 15% by 2030. But the broader sector is growing too; the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) estimates that the $11 trillion tourism and travel sector will grow by 2-3% this year.
“The damage the industry is doing is because of volume – and that’s growing,” Epler Wood notes.
One of the region’s winners from the post-pandemic travel boom has been Malaysia, which generated more than 100 billion ringgits ($22.6 billion) from tourism for the first time last year, the country’s arts, culture and tourism minister said in February. Malaysia has been seeking to sell a a sustainable brand of tourism as it tries to catch up with Thailand, says Eric Ricaurte, founder and CEO of Greenview, a travel consultancy.
He points to the Malaysian state of Sarawak on the island of Borneo, which has bet on Indigenous-led, community-based tourism to fill a revenue gap left by the pandemic, and bring in “greener” revenue sources than logging, palm oil and oil and gas. Visitors, who are encouraged to take a Responsible Tourism pledge, can stay in traditional longhouses, trek with local guides in rainforests, and learn traditional crafts, with proceeds benefiting the community and conservation efforts for endangered species such as the Bornean orangutan.
One big tourist attraction is the Sarawak Cultural Village, an award-winning “living museum” near Sarawak’s capital city, Kuching. The village is run by Sarawak Economic Development Corporation (SEDC), which pays Indigenous people from eight ethnic groups a salary to share their culture through stories, dance, food and traditional costume.
However, Celine Lim, who runs Sarawak-based Indigenous rights campaign group SAVE Rivers says: “Indigenous tourism in Sarawak is sadly monopolised by big players, with little regard to empowering community-based work. At worst, it romanticises Indigenous culture without acknowledging their fight for the rights to traditional territorial domains – where most of the tourism sites are.”
This was disputed by a spokesperson for Sarawak Tourism Board, who said: “We build tourism with the Indigenous community – not around or without them”. The spokesman said its sustainable tourism model was “locally anchored, ethically led, and designed for long-term community benefit – not short-term commercial gain.”
One problem for consumers seeking a sustainable tourism experience in Asia and elsewhere is that there are close to 200 different sustainability certifications for the tourism sector, each assessing a different aspect of environmental or social sustainability, with varying degrees of rigour.
Ricaurte says there have been efforts to harmonise the certification space through the Global Sustainable Tourism Council (GSTC), but no single scheme paints a complete picture of the sustainability of a hotel or a resort, and he says complying with audits to show continuous improvement is typically a box-ticking exercise.
In response, Randy Durband, CEO of GSTC, said the council was created precisely to weed greenwashing out of the industry. The standard’s requirement that hotels and destinations show continuous improvement has nudged the sector in the right direction, he said, albeit at a slower pace than some would like.
He points out that hotels around the world have made inroads on replacing tiny single-use plastic toiletries with refill options in the last year and a half.
“There has been a lot of movement from the big brands feeling pressure from capital markets and consumers. Now we need to see more movement from SMEs, which account for most of the industry,” he says.
Ricaurte says one game-changer is expected to be the European Union’s Green Claims Directive (GCD), which will prohibit marketing claims such as “carbon-neutral” or “earth-friendly” without evidence, by 2026.
Though the final text of the directive could be watered down as the EU looks to ease the regulatory compliance burden for businesses, Ricaurte says the impact of the GCD will be far-reaching, particularly for global hospitality brands.
“Suddenly, hotels and resorts will not be able to just claim to be green – they will have to implement what they’re claiming,” he says.
However, Christoper Imbsen, vice president of research and sustainability for the World Travel and Tourism Council, warns that the GCD could also lead to some companies abandoning sustainability programmes altogether.
Nevertheless, he believes it in the industry’s interests to do more to mitigate climate change, halt biodiversity loss and preserve culture. After all, it is nature and new cultures that tourists leave home to experience.
“Nature and culture are the books and tourism is the publisher,” says Imbsen. “We have to make sure we are good publishers.”
Without air-conditioning, you can wake up to birdsong
Nikoi and Cempedak are luxury private island resorts located in Indonesia’s Riau archipelago that attract wealthy holidaymakers from nearby Singapore.
Though not marketed as sustainable destinations, the owners of the sister resorts have invested heavily in building their environmental and social credentials.
Both resorts are constructed entirely from bamboo and powered by solar energy. The food is locally sourced and the menu is fixed, to reduce food waste. All waste is recycled, including wastewater, which is used to irrigate the soil. There is no air conditioning, to save energy, allowing guests to hear birdsong when they wake up in the morning.
The staff turnover rate is low for the sector, at around 10% annually. While many hospitality staff were let go during the pandemic, Nikoi and Cempedak staff were retained on reduced salaries and given ways to earn extra income by making muesli and doing beach clean-ups in partnership with plastic credits firm Seven Clean Seas.
All but two of the resorts’ 250 staff are Indonesian, and all of them have access to a company savings and loan scheme.
Perhaps the most significant of the company’s sustainability efforts is the Island Foundation, which provides education to villages on neighbouring islands. The resort has also funded research on the marine biodiversity of the area and has lobbied for it to be conserved as a protected marine park. The islands are home to endangered dugongs and filter feeders such as giant clams, sea cucumber and sea stars, which have been affected by bauxite mining on nearby Bintan island.
“Some people say that the only kind of sustainable tourism is no tourism. I disagree. It can be a force for good,” says Andrew Dixon, founder of the resorts. Both are members of The Long Run, a community of 73 tourism businesses around the world working on solutions to improve their local communities and culture, as well as contribute to conservation and the economy. Its certification standard, Global Ecosphere Retreat, requires members to meet 91 criteria across the four pillars of conservation, community, culture and commerce.
“We deliberately try not to push sustainability down the marketing pipeline,” Dixon says. “We want people to come because they have a great experience. … The mindset around eco-tourism gets people thinking that they’re giving something up by staying at an “eco” retreat”. (Robn Hicks/Reuters)
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