ABSTRACT
The rise in recognition and increasing attention to the environmental agenda, whether global warming/climate change or more broadly sustainable development, has stimulated much debate and activity (see Chapter 2). Latterly we have witnessed progress in the business sector in the recognition of environmental reporting and adoption of environmental auditing, corporate social responsibility and carbon offsetting. Tourism has not been immune from this, though by far the major focus has been the impact of tourism on the destination’s physical environment and the emergence of a variety of categories of tourism activity considered ‘more environmentally friendly,’ e.g., “green,” “Eco-tourism,” “sustainable tourism.” This orientation to ‘greener’ forms of tourism was primarily catalysed by the signifi cant rise in environmentalism during the 1980s, the United Nations Stockholm Conference of 1987, and the subsequent United Nations World Congress on the Environment and Development held in Rio de Janeiro, the world-renowned Earth Summit of 1992. This led to myriad policy developments and initiatives (for example, see Chapter 3) and as such serves as a particularly apposite starting point for this introduction and discussion. The aim is to highlight and explore the major themes, and specifi cally draw into contention areas such as air travel, the exploitation of “new” destinations and tour operators, which are not explicitly dealt with in the following chapters, by way of establishing a broader contextual framework for these chapters.
