As part of the Responsible Tourism Programme at World Travel Market last November we organised a panel on Child Protection with panellists talking about the issues which affect the children of holidaymakers and children in destinations – child abuse is an issue in all societies. When children are away with their parents or guardians they are more isolated with the accompanying adults than they may be at home and more alcohol may be consumed, the holiday experience can amplify problems between parents and between parents and children. Ask any resort manager or rep and they’ll have examples. TUI and Thomas Cook train their staff to deal with the issues of child protection which arise among families abroad.

The children’s charity Barnardo’s has reported this month an 84 per cent rise in children trafficked for sex abuse in the UK One in four of the victims of sexual abuse it worked with in September 2012 had been trafficked, an increase from one in six in September 2011. Its annual report reveals that 140 of the children it helped in September had been trafficked, up from 76 a year earlier.

Barnardo’s chief executive, Anne Marie Carrie,  said “We are shocked at the rise in the number of children reporting they have been moved around the country by abusers.”  She is calling for more to be done to identify the victims of child sexual exploitation who are being internally trafficked and to intervene to stop the activity.

Barnardo’s aid workers have identified ‘a growing trend’ of victims being taken to hotels with only online check-ins to avoid detection by staff. No one is arguing that the travel and tourism industry causes child abuse but the transport and accommodation facilities which are part of the industry are used by paedophiles.

Unless the industry is vigilant, and trains staff to spot child abuse and intervene effectively, it risks facilitating the sexual exploitation of children and a broad range of child abuse. There needs to be an expectation in the industry that staff will intervene whenever suspicions are raised, and staff need to be trained in what to look for and what to do if they have suspicions.

The sexual exploitation of children is not merely a developing country issue, as Barnardo’s report illustrates the challenge exists in all destinations. There were four times as many travel industry people at the wildlife panel discussion as there were at the one on child protection – that does not reflect well on the industry. The idea that the problem has been successfully tackled and that it is no longer a problem appears to have taken root. Unfortunately this is not the case.

The industry needs to address the issue to avoid playing a significant role in facilitating child abuse. There are strong ethical and reputational risk management reasons to prioritise the issue. It is time to take responsibility.

Facebook page on better child protection

Sylvia Masebo, Zambia’s Tourism Minster, has announced that Zambia has banned the hunting of lions and leopards because of the rapid decline in its numbers of big cats.

“Tourists come to Zambia to see the lion and if we lose the lion we will be killing our tourism industry,” she told Reuters.

Zambia’s tourism minister said there was more value in game-viewing tourism than blood sport, which brought in just $3m (£1.9m) last year and that the country did not have enough cats for hunting purposes.

Chuma Simukonda from the Zambia Wildlife Authority (ZAWA) said the ban would be bad for tourism. “The population of cats in Zambia is around 3,400 to 3,500 and with the ban on safari hunting for cats, we are likely to lose on revenue,” he told the AFP news agency.

Read more

This follows after Botswana banned hunting form January 2014 Read more

Relatively little attention has been paid to how responsible cruising is, the industry has kept a low profile on the issues of sustainability and there has been little attention paid to its performance. There have been a few radio and TV documentaries over the years dealing with some aspects of the industry’s performance; most recently Channel 4 broadcast a film, Cruises Undercover: The Truth Below Deck, about working conditions on cruise ships. There have been claims and counter claims about how accurate the reporting was –
take a look at the comments available on line
Paul Myles the journalist who worked for five weeks as an undercover waiter wrote in The Guardian

‘The ship is a poignant metaphor for wider global divisions; above deck, British passengers who have grown accustomed to affordable luxury, while below deck, an international workforce that has grown equally accustomed to providing the service to make this possible.’
Read more on why Cruise ships are a floating microcosm of our global economic hierarchy

Sue Bryant wrote on Cruise Critic

‘In some regions of the Philippines, from where many cruise ship crew come, the minimum wage is just over £3 a day in the backbreaking world of agriculture, with no accommodation and no food (both of which are provided on a cruise ship). So a cruise job is beginning to look quite attractive to a Filipino worker who can send home over £600 a month.’
Read Cruise Critic Blog

James Smith defended the cruise lines

‘While some of the staff from the Philippines and India are charged fees to join the company, this is not the practice of the cruise lines, but the hiring companies. While these agencies shouldn’t be used, the change of these bad practices will need an industry-wide reform. ………

For the most part, foreign crew members are paid according to their home economy, so when they return home they are able to afford an equivalent standard of living. The free food, accommodation, and flights home weren’t mentioned at all, which is a considerable subsidy for 6-10 month contracts.
Read The Dispatches Special Blog

War on Want ran a campaign on sweatships
Visit Campaign Webpage
In Canada Ross Klein maintains the Cruise Junkie website.
Visit Cruisejunkie Website

The industry protests that these exposes are unfair, but they won’t go away. The industry needs to address the sustainability issues which are being raised about its practises ranging from employment conditions, through carbon emissions and waste management.

Across the cruise industry there is considerable variation in sustainability reporting – see for example Carnival Corporations Sustainability Report for FY 2010 available online
See Report

ABTA has been scoping out sustainability best practice in relation to cruise operations in order to understand what best practice looks like in relation to sustainability on-board cruise ships. They are working on a set of indicators which will be discussed with the wider cruise industry in 2013,  ABTA is seeking to strengthen best practice and to provide transparency around good practice already happening within the industry.

Hopefully there will be further progress to report in 2013

Responsible Tourism recognises, encourages and celebrates diversity. The Cape Town Declaration on Responsible Tourism in Destinations recognised that ‘the transparent and auditable reporting of progress towards achieving responsible tourism targets and benchmarking is essential to the integrity and credibility of our work, to the ability of all stakeholders to assess progress and to enable consumers to exercise effective choice.’ Ten years on Responsible Tourism is increasingly being used as green wash, as Fiona Jeffery, Chair of World Travel Market, pointed out in November 2012 increasing numbers of people are using the language, but they are not all being responsible.|

‘Every year, more people jump aboard the responsible tourism ‘wagon’, but the challenge for the industry is to ensure that those companies and destinations who claim to be responsible – are just that. … As an industry, we need honest, transparent information about what they’re doing and what they’ve achieved – and so do customers.’

It is clear that if progress is to be made it is necessary to know what works and what doesn’t and we need to be able to reliably ascertain how much progress is being made. Businesses want to know how well they and their staff are doing in delivering against the company’s targets, to be able to report to the board and to their shareholders; and to be able to reward those staff delivering on their sustainability targets. Businesses also want to know how well other businesses are doing, in part to benchmark their own performance, but also to inform their purchasing decisions in their supply chain. Consumers may want to know how well a particular business is doing to inform their purchasing decisions. Councillors, local government officers, national park managers and donors want to know what progress has been made in reducing carbon pollution, water consumption, the reduction and management of waste, increasing local procurement and managing congestion – amongst a host of other things, at least to determine whether or not to fund such initiatives.

These different stakeholder groups are likely to want different information; although they will all want it to be reliable. There are broadly two complementary or competing responses to the need to monitor and report progress: certification and sustainability reporting, although as we shall see these approaches are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

Certification has been championed internationally by the Global Sustainable Tourism Council, they have developed criteria which are the ‘guiding principles and minimum requirements that any tourism business or destination should aspire to reach in order to protect and sustain the world’s natural and cultural resources’ ; although the minimum requirements are not clear. The GSTC has had significant funding, for the two calendar years 2009-2010 its income was USD 986,000 and it spent USD 823,000 , USD 591,000 on management, the website, marketing and PR and travel expenses. This level of funding is unlikely to be sustained and the profile of the GSTC is therefore likely to be lower in future. One of the world’s most successful tourism certification programmes, Green Tourism Business Scheme, is not a member of the GSTC. The GTBS has 2,352 members and is planning to begin to report on the success of its work with individual businesses in reducing negative environmental impacts by providing some of the metrics on for example, water, energy, waste and local sourcing. Travelife is an international certification scheme developed by the industry and with the advantages of being used by the operators to inform purchasing and recognised and promoted to consumers through the tour operators. It now has 700+ hotels engaged, 450+ having achieved an award.

Certification has been influential in some industries in driving sustainability, particularly where there are clear deliverables, for example Blue Flag beaches, or strong consumer resonance, as there is with fair trade labelling. Kuoni has applied the principles of fair trade labelling to holidays in South Africa. Tourism presents some particular challenges. First, a holiday is a complex product and it is a service industry, when I buy a fair trade coffee on the high street it is only the beans which are certified, not the coffee shop or the transport. Second, tourism takes place in diverse destinations in many different natural and cultural environments; the issues which arise vary considerably from one destination to another. Unlike coffee, timber or chocolate tourism is not a commodity. Third, tourism is consumed at the point of production in the destination; the consumers themselves have a significant impact on the sustainability of the activity depending on what they do and how they behave in the destination. In these significant ways tourism differs from other certified products.

There are a number of criticisms of certification as applied to tourism

• The sustainability issues which matter vary from place to place, reflecting the diversity of the world geographically and culturally, and different issues have prominence in different consuming cultures. Most of the sustainability impacts of tourism are local, only carbon pollution has a global impact; even water is not an issue everywhere. As we have seen South Africa has defined its own Responsible Tourism Standard and Brazil has a Sustainable Tourism Standard.

• The range of criteria which can be applied in assessing the sustainability of tourism is large. The challenge is to determine which criteria are most important in a particular places, they are not all equally important everywhere. With a large number of criteria it may be possible for a business to do a good many things and be graded highly, without addressing the most important local sustainability issues. There is also an issue about who defines locally significant issues, should it be the industry, NGOs or local government on behalf of communities?

• Certification is generally opaque because the consumer does not know what the business is doing to address any particular issue or what the level of achievement is on water conservation, water re-use, animal welfare or local sourcing. The guest experience cannot be enhanced by certification in the same way that eating a New Forest breakfast, enhances the holiday experience, creates a memory and a reason to return or encourage a friend to stay there.

• Anything which is advertised by the business, any sustainability claim which encourages someone to visit a particular business forms part of the contract and can be enforced, the client can seek compensation if the claim is false or the expected service is not delivered. The purchaser has no contract with the certifier and no remedy can be sought if a business does not live up to the way it is presented by the certifier. Certifiers are not liable to the consumer for the claims they make, the claims are in any case unclear.|

• This gives rise to a second difficulty with certification. Given that neither the end consumer nor the purchasing business has any means of seeking recompense for a wrongly certified business what mechanism is available to ensure that the certifier does not bend or break the rules? The GTBS only allow employed staff to certify, most other schemes use self-employed sub-contractors to certify and charge for the training they provide. It is not clear to the purchaser how robust the processes used by the certifying agency are to check the work of these independent certifiers. Third party certification is favoured by those who may secure the work, but it leaves open the question of how the work of those certifiers is supervised and how standards are enforced. Some third party certification processes are overseen by professional bodies, with disciplinary processes in place, where the loss of membership is itself a significant penalty and one which secures compliance with professional standards most of the time. There are, as yet, no such professional licensing schemes in place for tourism certifiers.

• Concern is sometimes expressed about the churn, the number of businesses which do not remain with the schemes, initial membership has often been subsidised. Businesses essentially get two related but very distinct benefits from the certification schemes: environmental management advice and marketing based on the certification. The quality of both services varies from one scheme to another. The businesses receive advice about how to reduce the negative environmental impacts of their activities and to reduce costs, and about how they might improve their economic and social impacts. Certification and grading is often claimed to have marketing value. At renewal those businesses which have found market advantage are more likely to renew, those who have received good advice may have a programme of change which is on-going and for which they need no more advice. They are likely to leave the scheme creating the churn; the churn may not be a bad thing as it may represent no more than a judgment on the marketing value of the label. Those businesses which leave may well continue to implement the advice provided by the certification scheme, having not need of further advice until the first programme of work has been completed.

The certification process is distinct for the sustainability management advice. There are two elements to certification – the selection of issues which are monitored and the integrity of the grading or reporting. The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) , the International Standards Organisation (ISO) and other international and national bodies are developing processes which more or less robustly enforce professional standards on the certifiers and the way that the grading procedures are applied. Some certifiers will be members of professional bodies able effectively to police the standards and performance of their members, but few of those engaged in certifying tourism businesses are supervised in this way. Some schemes use employed staff whose work is supervised; others carefully assess the certifiers’ written reports and oversee the decision on grading. However there is a wide range of practice in the supervision and quality control of the work undertaken by certifiers, in my view too much variation to permit one scheme safely to recognise the certificates issued by another.
Reporting is more transparent in that the consumer is able to see what the business claims to be doing on particular issues, judge for themselves how much progress they are making and compare one business with another on those issues which particularly matter to the purchaser.

These claims are the responsibility of the business which reports its approach to sustainability and its achievements, the purchaser can potentially demand recompense if false claims are made. Sustainability reporting is becoming increasingly common with businesses being required to report on carbon emissions, consumers are becoming increasingly familiar with energy labelling. The Global Reporting Initiative, the Carbon Disclosure Project and international standards like ISO 14001 are establishing reporting standards which offer an addition or alternative to certification, and they are pressing for external assurance and/or verification to increase the reliability of the data. There is no incompatibility between the two approaches, companies like TUI use certification, GRI based reporting and ISO 14001. It may be that as with GTBS the next stage is for certification to go beyond grading and add verified reporting of progress towards particular sustainability targets.

Because tourists travel to the destination to consume the product the impacts of the consumers need to be managed, sustainable tourism cannot at the destination level be reduced to the certification of businesses. At the destination level the council will want to manage congestion, parking and litter, as will the national park manager. Both will also want in a water scarce area to reduce water consumption; and waste and carbon emissions at the destination level. Those who provide certification schemes are likely to come under increasing pressure from donors and policy makers to report the impact of their work on water and energy consumption per bed night or local sourcing rather than the number of businesses being graded. Responsible Tourism Reporting is building on the success which the Responsible Tourism Awards have been having in securing date from those in the running for an award, large and small businesses are now demonstrating that they are able to collect and report data on their impacts and verification systems are being developed.

Too often we hear and read bland assurances about this or that investment or management initiative contributing to sustainable tourism. The expression ‘sustainable tourism’ has been hollowed out, stripped of meaning. We do not have a workable definition of sustainable tourism; we don’t have one for sustainability or sustainable development either.

The management mantra, if we can’t measure it we can’t manage it, is too rarely applied to the challenge of achieving sustainability. That is why Responsible Tourism puts the emphasis on defining the issue, the problem that needs to be addressed, identifying what needs to be done, the desirable end point and a means of monitoring progress towards achieving the objective and transparently reporting progress.

The main outcome of Rio +20 was The future we want View Full Document  It made two references to tourism, both very bland: one calling for ‘enhanced support for sustainable tourism activities and relevant capacity-building in developing countries in order to contribute to the achievement of sustainable development’; the other calling for increased investment and ‘appropriate guidelines and regulations in accordance with national priorities and legislation for promoting and supporting sustainable tourism.’  Sustainable tourism is identified as a good thing and placed on the wish list after energy and before sustainable transport.

The problem is that we need to see the clear identification of particular issues which can be addressed, for example, reducing water usage, energy consumption and the production of waste, increasing local employment and local sourcing. Local priorities need to be identified and addressed by those stakeholders who can make a difference – we should then expect those who can make a difference, to take their responsibility and do what is necessary.

Paragraph 47 of The future we want, provides some grounds for optimism, acknowledged ‘the importance of corporate sustainability reporting’ and encouraged ‘companies, where appropriate, especially publicly listed and large companies, to consider integrating sustainability information into their reporting cycle.’   The governments of Brazil, Denmark, France and South Africa are pushing this approach they have launched a Charter of the Group of Friends of Paragraph 47 View full document   asserting that the ‘inclusion of corporate sustainability reporting in Paragraph 47’ is ‘a step forward in the advancement of an international culture of corporate transparency and accountability.’ They argue that: ‘Governments play an essential role in ensuring the effective application of laws and regulations, as well as creating a culture of corporate transparency.’

One of the reasons that we have seen significant progress on sustainable tourism by the larger companies has been the application of their management systems to sustainability objectives. By setting targets, reporting against those targets and rewarding employees with bonuses based on achieving these sustainability objectives progress is both assured and reported.
View Website

More transparency in reporting is what we need.We’;ll address this at WTMWRTD in 2013

The average household spent £68.30 per week on recreation and culture in 2006 and in 2011 £63.90, that is a decline of 6.9%

Spending on hotels and restaurants declined by 11%

The average British household spent £483.60 per week in 2011 down £49.40 since 2006, average household disposable income fell by £25 – we are, on average, getting poorer

There is no disaggregated data for tourism, all figures based on 2011 prices.

Original date available

Botswana has announced that hunting will be banned from January 2014, the interests of non-consumptive tourism (photo-safaris and game viewing) have won out over sport hunting. The view that the decline in wildlife poses e a genuine threat to both the conservation of Botswana’s natural heritage and the long-term health of the local tourist industry has prevailed,

Permanent Secretary Edmont Moabi has been reported as saying
“This comes as a realisation that the shooting of wild game purely for sport and trophies is no longer seen to be compatible with either our national commitment to conserve and preserve local fauna or the long-term growth of the local tourism industry,”

There will still be limited traditional hunting for some local communities within designated wildlife management areas.

President Obama has signed the bill prohibiting US airlines from participating in the EU’s emissions trading scheme. More

The European Commission has suggested to the EU Member States that the clock be stopped for one year. But failure by ICAO to deliver will result in automatic resumption of the process and the EU ETS legislation would be enforced.

“As a gesture of good faith the EU will “stop the clock” on the implementation of the international aspects of its ETS aviation by deferring the obligation to surrender emissions allowances from air traffic to and from the EU by one year. This means that the EU would not require allowances to be surrendered in April 2013 for emissions from such flights during the whole of 2012. The monitoring and reporting obligations will also be deferred for such flights. The obligations relating to all operators’ activities within EU will remain intact and compliance with the EU law will be enforced in this respect.” more

On 21 December 2011 the European Court of Justice upheld the legislation stating that it does not infringe the principles of territoriality or third country sovereignty. The Court also stated that the EU ETS does not constitute a tax, fee or charge on fuel, which could be in breach of the EU-US Air Transport Agreement. It concluded that the uniform application of the EU ETS to all flights which depart or arrive from the EU is consistent with provisions designed to prohibit discriminatory treatment between aircraft operators on nationality grounds also covered by this agreement. more

http://www.thinkchildsafe.org/thinkbeforevisiting/

The issues of child protection extend well beyond paedophilia, although as Marina Diotallevi of UNWTO made clear there is still much to be done to eradicate child sex tourism. Stephen Farrant of the International Tourism Partnership talked about the work they are doing to counter trafficking and through the Youth Career Initiative to train and find work for vulnerable young people in hospitality. Julie Naylor of Thomas Cook described how they are working with families away on holiday and stressed to address the child protection issues which arise among the tourist families. Claire Ellaway of WCE talked about how they tackle the issues which arise around youth expeditions. Watch the WTMWRTD video

The issue of orphanage tourism, raised last year by Michael Horton, came up again this year. There is now plenty of evidence that internal child trafficking is happening in Cambodia and a number of other countries. The willingness of tourists to contribute to the orphanages they love to visit means that setting up orphanages has become a lucrative and unscrupulous business. Tourism is funding the internal trafficking of children.

Daniela Papi of PEPY and PEPY Tours has written in the Huffington Post

“According to a recent UNICEF report, three out of every four children in Cambodian “orphanages” have one or more living parents. A well-meaning tourism sector is spawning some horrible orphanages, fuelling the separation of children and parents, keeping kids out of school to entertain tourists and aiding corruption by adults who are using these children to profiteer, all in the name of “service.””

Al Jazeera ran an expose on Cambodia’s Orphan Business back in June and named Projects Abroad. You can watch the video at link

This panel discussions about volunteering and child protection this year as part of WTM World Responsible Tourism Day provoked lively engagement from the floor. Both of the sessions were videoed and it is worth finding an hour or two  to watch both of them. Child Protection & Volunteering

In the discussion about volunteering the issue of orphanage tourism came up again, it is surely time, to recognise that  Children are not tourist actions, and to stop this exploitation.

For more on Better Volunteering  and for Better Child Protection just click through

This year’s debate on World Responsible Tourism Day at WTM was on whether the industry is doing enough to reduce its carbon pollution. Most of those who were there felt that it wasn’t – before and after the debate.
Watch the video of the debate on line

The industry speakers made a good case for industry beginning to address the issue and having plans to further reduce the carbon pollution they cause primarily through transport and heating and cooling buildings.  But we are running out of time.

PwC (Price Waterhouse Coopers) produces an annual Low Carbon Index; this year it makes grim reading. The watershed had been crossed. Avoiding a 2% rise in average global temperatures is no long conceivable, according to PwC. They are not an environmental campaigning organisation; do not lightly dismiss this as scaremongering.

Business as usual is no longer a sustainable business strategy – if ensuring that your business is profitable in the medium term matters to you and your shareholders you can no longer ignore climate change.

PwC estimates that in 2011 the “rate of improvement in carbon intensity was 0.8%. Even doubling our rate of decarbonisation, would still lead to emissions consistent with six degrees of warming. To give ourselves a more than 50% chance of avoiding two degrees will require a six-fold improvement in our rate of decarbonisation.”
Click here for more information

This does not seem likely – the problem is that decarbonisation needs to happen fast, it needs to happen now.  The travel and tourism industry and most other industries are not acting fast enough.

PwC  go on to warn that “one thing is clear: businesses, governments and communities across the world need to plan for a warming world – not just 2ºC, but 4ºC and, at our current rates, 6ºC.”

Delay is costly and it transfers the problem to the next generation – our children.

It reminds me of the famous post war question: What did you do in the war against climate change?

We are not doing enough; we shall leave the problem to our children.

Meanwhile

1. Heathrow is making the case for a third runway. Hopefully Sir Howard Davies’s review will establish the facts.

• Heathrow argues that it does not have the slots to develop air routes to China and other emerging markets, maybe the ones it has should be reallocated? Maybe it should count Hong Kong as a Chinese city, it doesn’t.

• At present only 34.1% of passengers at Heathrow are using it as a hub and the expansion in flights by budget carriers is largely point-to-point.

• More Chinese visitors head to the continent than to London. Is that about air access or Britain being outside the Schengen visa zone?

•  Apparently there is a bilateral agreement which limits direct flights to 62 a week

Download One hub or none: The case for a single UK hub airport

It is to be hoped that Davies will be able to provide a balanced assessment to the options and for example determine what the future of aviation looks like – will there be more point-top-point flying or will hubs hold their own? I do not think that the evidence is clear.

2. The International Civil Aviation Organization managed to ensure that aviation was excluded from Kyoto – rather than looking to see what it could do to address carbon pollution it sought to be absolved of any responsibility and to avoid doing anything to address the issue. Finally on 15th November 2012 the Council of ICAO agreed

“to form a special High-level Group to provide near-term recommendations on a series of policy issues which have arisen in the course of ICAO’s ongoing research into the feasibility of a global market-based measure (MBM) scheme appropriate to international aviation, as well as its development of a policy Framework to guide the general application of any proposed MBM measures to international air transport activity.”

The report should be ready by October 2013 – not much sense of haste. I was in 2010 that the ICAO Assembly instructed the Council “to prepare and deliver both the MBM Framework and Feasibility Report for consideration by its next triennial Assembly in October 2013.” So it has taken two years just to agree to start work.
Read more

3. The European Commission agreed on 12th November, no coincidence this, to postpone the planned extension of rules that require airlines to pay for their carbon pollution to include flights to and from non-EU destinations. “Stopping the clock” creates space for the political negotiations and demonstrates confidence on the side of the EU that together with international partners we will succeed in ICAO to agree on meaningful international action.”
Find out more

Since January 1st the EU Emissions Trading Scheme has applied to flights within the European Union plus The airlines have said that this will cost them 17.5bn euros ($22.3bn; £14.0bn) over eight years. But the EU has argued that it only adds between four and 24 euros to the price of a long-haul flight.
Read more

We are shuffling forward far too slowly – exacerbating the problem we leave for our children and which many of those alive today will have to face by 2050, or sooner.