International Coalition of Tourism Partners Executive Board Releases Statement for the New Year

HALEIWA, HI, USA, December 31, 2014 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Signed by Prof. Geoffrey Lipman, Juergen T Steinmetz, Alain St.Ange and Feisol Hashim, the International Coalition of Tourism Partners Executive Board releases statement for the New Year.

ICTP is again setting out its belief that 2015 is a pivotal year to build a great coalition helping to move the Travelism sector in the direction of Green Growth.

We reiterate our vision of helping the vast majority at the base of the travel and tourism pyramid to support this transformation shift. Our goal is to create a simple that allows our communities - travelism destinations and stakeholders of residents, visitors and service supply chain - to engage positively in the massive changes that the world is embarked upon.

Changes that are driving global, regional, national and local actions, to simultaneously combat pervasive overlapping challenges of extreme economic volatility, social inclusion and environmental consequence. This approach is popularly termed Triple Bottom Line balance but we now have the realities of:

• Today’s urgent, multi-decade, existential response to climate change & earth habitation impacts.
• Tomorrow’s people explosion, consumer expansion and resource (food and water) usage.

This bigger transformation can be seen as Triple Bottom Line Plus – to encompass change dynamics that we increasingly see as disaster response, small island resilience, smart cities, renewable energy, biodiversity conservation, reforestation, park reconnection, blue oceans, coastal watch and the like. Change dynamics that go far beyond traditional travel and tourism systems and structures, but in which all of us engage every day as governance, trade and civil society – increasingly plugged in on our interconnecting mobile devices.

There are many competing names for this transformation – circular economy, sharing economy, sustainable development, green economy blue economy etc but we like the idea of Green Growth,
It rightly features Growth as the key element, using the traditional measurements of arrivals and receipts on gdp, trade and employment etc. to show wealth and work creation. But by identifying Green as a fundamental precursor:

• We will keep a focus on low carbon, renewable energy, connectivity infrastructure (soft and hard), technology innovation, inclusionary and conservationist minded expansion
• We will underscore the importance of having new metrics and structures to measure and address impacts of travelism, with the same certainty as we now, after 20 years, promote the size, scale and benefits of travel and tourism.
• We will increase our efforts to support open research, information access, capacity building and local community inclusion, with academic engagement and knowledge sharing systems.
• We will encourage initiatives, tools and structures that support actions by the many at the base of the pyramid, as well as the publicized actions of the few at the top.

In the coming months we will reach out to Destinations, Organizations and Travel Networks to explore how we can contribute more meaningfully to the global green growth transformation and the big changes shaping our world, that will be promulgated in 2015’s global Heads of State Summits on Adaptation Financing, Sustainable Development and Carbon Targets. These will provide the guiding tools for what Secretary General Ban Ki Moon has called The Future We Want.
Happy New Year!

More than 100 destination already joined ICTP. ICTP welcomes tourism boards and stakeholders (hotels, transportation, tour operator, attractions) to join.
For more information and to join ICTP visit http://www.ictp.travel

Juergen Steinmetz
ICTP
+1-808-536-1100
email us here

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