Environmental Management and Tourism Sustainability

Environmental Management

• Environmental management involves interrelated elements working together to achieve effective environmental management.
• Understanding the structure and functioning of the earth, and human interaction, is essential.
• Environmental management is complex, focusing on predicting future changes and maximizing human benefit while minimizing degradation.
• Decision-making and political aspects play a significant role in the process.
• Environmental management involves identifying desired outcomes, constraints, feasible solutions, and anticipating/solving issues.

A Sustainable Relationship Between Tourism and the Environment

• Tourism and the environment are interdependent.
• Continued tourism expansion requires sustainable interaction between tourism and the environment.
• This involves addressing negative impacts, encouraging good practices, maintaining a sense of proportion, increasing tourist and industry awareness, and covering environmental costs of tourism.
• Conservation and development must be balanced.

The Scope of the Concept of Environment

• The natural environment includes mountains, seas, rivers, lakes, caves, beaches, and natural woodland.
• Wildlife encompasses land-based mammals, reptiles, flora, birds, insects, fish, and marine mammals.
• The farmed environment includes agricultural landscapes, man-made forests, and fish farms.
• The built environment includes individual buildings, villages, townscapes, transport infrastructure, and dams.
• Natural resources include water, climate, and air.

Implementing Environmental Management via an Environmental Management System

• Environmental Management Systems provide means to improve environmental performance continually.
• Effective EMS uses the Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA) model.
• Benefits include enforcing sustainable action, establishing a marketing advantage, reducing environmental incidents, improving business reputation, decreasing costs, attracting shareholders, and improving regulatory performance.

Environmental Impact Assessment

• An EIA is a document used to calculate the environmental impacts of planned developments.
• EIAs are technical assessments aiding objective decision-making.
• EIAs have legal status under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in the US.
• EIAs are becoming more widely used globally.
• The government policy requires industrial projects to obtain EIA clearance from the ministry of environment.

8 Guiding Principles of the Entire Process of EIA

• Participation ensures appropriate and timely access for interested parties.
• Transparency ensures assessment decisions and their basis are open and accessible.
• Certainty establishes process and timing of the assessment.
• Accountability makes decision-makers liable for their actions.
• Credibility ensures professionalism and objectivity in the assessment process.
• Cost effectiveness aims at environmental protection at the lowest possible cost to society.
• Flexibility allows adaptable responses to proposals and decision-making situations.
• Practicality ensures usable information and outputs from the assessment process.

Participants in EIA Process

• Proponents are government or private bodies initiating projects.
• Decision-makers are designated individuals or groups.
• Assessors are responsible for preparing the EIS.
• Reviewers include individuals, agencies, or boards involved in the revision process.
• Expert advisors are individuals and/or organizations with relevant expertise.

EIA Process in Sequence of Application

• Stakeholders' involvement occurs in various stages of EIA for efficiency and efficacy.
• Project screening and scoping determine EIA requirements, screening criteria, and scope of EIA.

Project Design and Construction, Project Operation, Site Characteristics, Possible Environmental Impacts, Mitigation Measures, Monitoring and Auditing Measures, Socio-Economic Factors

• Detailed considerations and measures regarding project design, operation, site features, potential impacts, mitigation strategies, monitoring procedures, and Socio-economic implications are covered in these sections.

Availability of Information and Resources

• Availability of local and external experts, guidelines, technical information, and relevant publications to evaluate potential project impacts are important factors to consider.
• Experts assess the relevant environmental data and assess views of individuals or groups.
• Availability of qualified manpower is necessary.

Importance of EIA

• EIA is a key component of good environmental management.
• Government policy mandates EIA clearance for industrial projects.
• EIA helps make development projects sustainable.
• It helps reduce environmental and economic costs.
• Optimizes projects.
• Screening categorizes projects, and scoping determines critical issues.
• Detailed prediction and mitigation studies are conducted in parallel with feasibility studies.
• EIA output is called an Environmental Impact Statement and includes a detailed management plan.
• Audit assesses the process and provides feedback mechanisms.

Process of Environmental Impact Assessment

• Screening: initial analysis of a project’s impacts.
• Scoping: establishing boundaries and project alternatives.
• Impact Assessment & Mitigation: assessing potential socioeconomic and environmental implications and developing mitigation strategies.

Impact Management, Review and Licensing, Monitoring

• Impact management deals with mitigation planning, and potential risks such as natural or technical problems.
• Review and licensing involve authority review of the EIA report, including potential revisions.
• Monitoring ensures appropriate implementation of mitigation strategies, EMP goals, and contingency plans.

Application of Environmental Impact Assessment

• comprehensive picture of project effects (including affected groups), focuses on essential issues, avoids wasting effort on irrelevant information, ensures effective planning, identifies alternatives, highlights legislation, avoids delays, reduces disagreements, and reduces the risk of disputes or disputes.

Environmental Controlling and Auditing

• Environmental control and auditing assess environmental performance against standards.
• Environmental audits evaluate compliance and implementation of environmental management systems, similar to financial audits.
• Environmental audits examine, identify, and understand environmental impacts and regulations.

3 Main Types of Environmental Audits

• Environmental compliance audits verify an organization's adherence to environmental standards.
• Environmental management audits assess an organization's environmental objectives.
• Functional environmental audits assess specific functional areas (e.g., water, electricity)

Benefits of Environmental Audits

• Understanding legal requirements and specific statutory reporting.
• Demonstrating environmental responsibility, policy implementation, and managing environmental risks.
• Assessing environmental interactions, and managing environmental risks

ISO 19011 (2012)

• Guidelines for auditing management systems, providing information for environmental auditor selection criteria.

Environmental Auditors

• Personal attributes: ethics, perceptiveness, and tact.
• Understanding audit principles, procedures, and techniques.
• Experience with conducting environmental audits.
• Appropriate level of education and adequate skills.

Audit Team Leaders

• Efficient planning and resource allocation.
• Effective communication and leadership skills.

Carrying Capacity Concept

• Maximum number of visitors a site can accommodate without undesirable environmental impacts and decline in visitor experience quality.
• Various factors—environmental, physical, socio-cultural, and perceptual impact—affect carrying capacity.

Dimensions of Carrying Capacity

• Environmental: Capacity without damage
• Physical: Capacity through offered services and facilities
• Economic: Growth of tourism, avoiding inflation and commodity shortage

Factors Affecting Carrying Capacity

• Tourists (mass tourism vs. independent): Mass tourism has a larger environmental impact
• Destination: Accessibility, seasonality, crowdedness, accessibility to necessities.
• Local factors: Technological advance, local infrastructure
• Guest-host relationship: Local perspective of tourists, adaptation efforts

Visitor and Traffic Management

• Controlling visitor numbers and behavior to minimize negative impact.
• Visitor management is a key part of destination management.
• Visitor management involves stakeholders, visitor experiences, quality, indicators & frameworks, and political/social aspects.

Importance of Visitor Attractions

• Attract tourists from abroad and stimulate domestic tourism
• Supports regeneration, contributes to the local economy, promotes cultural change, and fosters conservation.
• Purpose-built, natural attractions, events, and heritage attractions are all important tourism features.

Positive and Negative Roles of Tourism Attractions

• Positive roles: Revenue generation, preservation/promotion of heritage, infrastructure development, improvements to local quality of life
• Negative roles: Environmental damage, disruption to traditional lifestyles, negative impacts of large-scale tourism, and pressure on local resources.

Heritage Tourism

• Exploring the history and heritage of a place is the primary purpose of heritage tourism.
• Examples of heritage attractions include historical architecture, museums, and cultural experiences.

Tourist Destinations in the Philippines

• Specific tourist destinations in the Philippines (Boracay and more) including their features and significance.

Trends in Sustainable Tourism

• Sustainability as a lifestyle, more tourists using electric vehicles, growing demand for slow and cycling tourism, experiencing the benefits of experiential tourism, digital detox and immersion in nature.

Tourism and Climate Change; Impacts

• Tourism is vulnerable to climate change (e.g., extreme weather events) and contributes to greenhouse gas emissions.
• Climate action is crucial to sustainability, and adaptation strategies are important.
• Impacts include warmer temperatures, shrinking glaciers, extreme weather, reduced precipitation, sea-level rise, changes in biodiversity, and more frequent or intense forest fires, all threatening tourism destinations.

Technology and Sustainable Tourism

• Technology is crucial to enable more valuable use of natural resources and less environmental damage, especially for the tourism industry and its sustainability efforts.

Other Impacts of Climate Change

• Specific changes to the environment due to climate change and the issues created for tourism destinations.

This quiz explores key concepts in environmental management and the sustainable relationship between tourism and the environment. It highlights the complexity of decision-making processes, human interactions, and the essential balance needed to promote sustainable tourism practices. Test your knowledge on environmental management principles and their impact on tourism.