How is Sustainable Tourism Development defined and enacted?
According to the Organization of American States, sustainable tourism development is defined as follows: • Preserving the current resource base for future generations. • Maintaining the productivity of the resource base. • Maintaining biodiversity and avoiding irreversible environmental changes. • Ensuring equity between and within generations. • Maintaining and protecting the heritage (culture and history) of the area, region or nation. The Global Sustainable Research Center suggests the following: • Tourism should be initiated with the help of broad-based community- inputs and the community should maintain control of tourism development. • Tourism should provide quality employment to its residents and a linkage between the local businesses and tourism should be established. • A code-of-practice should be established for tourism at all levels based on internationally accepted standards. • Guidelines for tourism operations, impact assessment, monitoring of cumulative impacts, and limit
