Explore Resources

This UNGC report produced in consultation with over 300 stakeholders, identified five tipping points for a healthy and productive ocean that represent a set of tangible objectives to address ocean sustainability challenges.

This quick start guide provides an easy-to-follow action plan on carbon reduction and offsetting, with practical examples and tips for other tourism businesses to follow.

Cruise tourism research has developed exponentially during the past decades. Global tourism activity in general and cruises in particular are concentrated in coastal areas and represent a dominant part of the so-called ‘blue economy’. Within this context, the public debate surrounding the impact of cruise tourism on port communities reflects a narrative of unsustainable growth, environmental pollution and negative globalization-related symbolism. Yet, the relatively small size of the cruise sector and the over-focus on emissions arguably misrepresents the overall impact and potential of this tourism domain for portside communities, economies and ecosystems. Cruise-related scientific research, as probably expected, offers a much more refined and holistic picture, transcending the somewhat populist public debate on this matter. Based on a systematic literature review examining cruise-related papers published between 1983 and 2009, Papathanassis and Beckmann (2011) Annals of Tourism Research 38(1), 153–174, identified 145 papers, which were subsequently subjected to a metadata- and a thematic-analysis.

Approximately, a quarter of them addressed the environmental-, social- and economic impacts of cruising on coastal regions. A decade later, and following an analogous methodological approach, a total of 305 cruise research papers, published between 2012 and 2022, yielded 161 relevant papers, subjected to the same coding scheme and thematically compared to previous findings. The subsequent thematic analysis, revealed a comprehensive set of issues, opportunities and challenges cruise tourism poses to coastal areas. Following a critical discussion of past developments and their trajectory, a future research and action agenda is proposed.

This CBD, UNEP, and UNWTO report provides stakeholders with the tools to make the tourism sector more biodiversity friendly and more socially just. It addresses the links between tourism development, biological diversity conservation, and development / poverty reduction.

This One Planet guide provides information on the impacts of the environment, the rationale for good practice and suggestions on how to reduce the impacts related to boat operation, maintenance and during marine excursions. A self-assessment checklist is inserted to promote among marine recreation providers the practice of evaluating environmental performance.

This Tourism Industry Association of Nova Scotia tool provides a simple online self-assessment for tourism operators to measure their own practices and work toward improvements, and includes ideas and best practices to enhance competitiveness.

This SNV and University of Hawaii toolkit, recommended for anyone involved in the funding, planning or managing of a community-based tourism project, is designed to provide readers with the know-how to set up and run a monitoring programme for a community-based tourism project via step-by-step guidelines, supported by a wide range of case studies, in order to enable readers to embark on their own monitoring project.

This Routledge book, created for tourism academics and for professionals involved in managing adventure tourism enterprises, examines the adventure tourism product, the adventure tourist profile, and provides a deeper analysis of issues including supply, geography and sustainability through a variety of case studies.

A project that includes alternative tourist strategies to enhance the local sustainable development of tourism by promoting Mediterranean identity.

Alter Eco Plus will support "mainstreaming processes" to improve public policies related to tourism management. The starting point is the “Carrying Capacity Limit” calculation tool, a fully operational and functional tool/methodology, which will support the decision-making process and the mechanisms relating to policies to facilitate territorial absorption. The aim is to facilitate the integration of the tool which aims to balance the effects of tourism development taking into account the CCL and expanding the focus of tourism development beyond the local destination level. Our CCL tool will also provide threshold values on the risk of tourism Covid 19 pandemic contagion.

This World Bank Group report presents fourteen key characteristics displayed in most successful tourism concessioning programs.