Towards a cleaner planet: Move over sustainable tourism, regenerative travel is here

Once accounting for 10 per cent of employment worldwide, the sector is poised to shed 121 mn jobs, with losses projected at a minimum of $3.4 trillion, according to the World Travel & Tourism Council.

But in the lull, some in the tourism industry are planning for a post-vaccine return to travel that’s better than it was before March 2020 — greener, smarter and less crowded. If sustainable tourism, which aims to counterbalance the social and environmental impacts associated with travel, was the aspirational outer limit of eco-tourism before the pandemic, the new frontier is “regenerative travel,” or leaving a place better than you found it. “Sustainable tourism is sort of a low bar. At the end of the day, it’s just not making a mess of the place,” said Jonathon Day, an associate professor focused on sustainable tourism at Purdue University. “Regenerative tourism says, let’s make it better for future generations.”

Regenerative travel has its roots in regenerative development and design, which includes buildings that meet the US Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design or LEED standards. The concept has applications across many fields, including regenerative agriculture, which aims to restore soils and sequester carbon. “Generally, sustainability, as practiced today, is about slowing down the degradation,” said Bill Reed, an architect and principal of Regenesis Group, a design firm based in Massachusetts and New Mexico that has been practicing regenerative design, including tourism projects, since 1995. He described efforts like fuel efficiency and reduced energy use as “a slower way to die.”

“Regeneration is about restoring and then regenerating the capability to live in a new relationship in an ongoing way,” he added. With most travel suspended during the pandemic, regenerative travel remains at the starting gate. Regenerative tourism addresses impacts holistically, from destination and community perspectives as well as environmental.

Determining what makes a place better and who makes that decision requires local involvement, according to regenerative tourism proponents. VisitFlanders, the tourism organization representing the Northern Belgium region, used local input to rethink its mission, repositioning its stance from growing travel for the sake of the economy to creating an “economy of meaning,” according to its master plan. That includes, among other initiatives, linking visitors with locals who share their passions for things like history or food and making storytelling central to sites like its World War I battlefields.

“We’ve managed to shift the thinking from having their primary objective be about growing the numbers, to creating flourishing destinations, flourishing communities and having them say what kind of tourism they want,” said Anna Pollock, the founder of Conscious Travel, an education and consulting enterprise devoted to positioning travel as a force for good, who worked with VisitFlanders.

Pollock believes regenerative travel is a supply-side concept that asks operators to do more for the environment and community than they take from them. But travellers play a key role in demand. “Become mindful of the fact that your trip is going to have a set of costs associated with it, which needs to be paid by somebody,” she said.