Tourism and Sustainable Development Goals

Book excerpt: This comprehensive volume comprises some of the best scholarship on sustainable tourism in recent years, demonstrating the rich body of past research that provides a fertile and critical ground for studies on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by tourism geographers and other social scientists in the future. Since the turn of the 1990s many international development and policy-making organisations have perceived the tourism industry, with its local and regional connections, as a high-potential tool for putting sustainable development into practice. The capacity of tourism to work for sustainable development was highlighted in relation to the United Nations’ SDGs, which were adopted in 2015. The SDGs define the agenda for global development to 2030 by addressing pertinent challenges such as poverty, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, and peace and justice. Tourism geographers and allied disciplines have held strong and long-term interest in sustainability issues, and their chapters in this collection contribute significantly to this emerging and highly policy-relevant research field. This book was originally published as an online special issue of the journal Tourism Geographies.