Sustainable Development of Tourism

The tourism industry has relied largely on the environment. As climate change is directly threatening the environment of tourism destinations, sustainable development in the tourism industry must be employed to protect the environment. This chapter discusses the importance of sustainable development in tourism sector. Examples on unsustainable development in the tourism sector are discussed in terms of the three pillars of sustainability, which are economy, society and environment. A top-down policy based-tourism in Thailand and greenwashed ecotourism are used as unsustainable development cases. Overview of the two sustainability-driven approaches, which are supply chain management (SCM) and life cycle approach (LCA), are provided. Both SCM and LCA can be adopted by tourism enterprises and stakeholders to ease in unsustainable development of a business as usual situation in the tourism sector. Also, how an integrated LCA-SCM framework perspective can be applied to the tourism sector during a crisis, e.g. COVID-19, to avoid unsustainable tourism activities is recommended.