Sustainable Tourism

1.0 Executive summary

With the focus of sustainable tourism, this report will look into the carbon offset activities of Changi Airport Group (CAG). Being the most awarded airport in the world and 46.5 million of passenger movement in the year of 2011, CAG may face environment sustainability issues. In view of triple bottom-line of economic, socio-cultural and environment, a field study was made to Changi Airport to evaluate its sustainability with the ST indicators. Detailed analysis were done on the ST indicators and results shown that CAG could be improved in terms of environmental friendly on their carbon offset activities. Hence, recommendations were introduced such as visitor impact management, environmental impact management and limits of acceptable change.

2.0 Introduction

This report aims to focus on the discussion of the relationship between the Changi Airport Group and the sustainability of the tourism activities. A field trip was made to Changi Airport and the findings will serve as the basis for this report. A set of indicators were identified during the field trip in conjunction to triple bottom-line with economic, socio-cultural and environmental factors. Facts of Changi Airport are provided in Appendix I.

3.0 Objectives of report

The objective of this report is to further discuss on the evaluation of the usefulness of indicators on the measurement of ST activities, followed by detailed analysis and recommendations based on Changi Airport.

4.0 Literature review

This section will look into the discussion of issues pertaining to carbon neutrality, carbon offsets, carbon footprints, evolution of sustainable tourism and sustainable tourism indicators with an in-depth research of literature reviews.

4.1 Sustainable Tourism

(Hunter C. , 1997) defines sustainable tourism (ST) as a need to maintain the environment and society for the future generation in order to remain viable. It looks into the context of the triple bottom-line of economically beneficial, environmental-friendly and social-cultural sustainability. With the world evolving, (Kuo & Chen, 2009)states that there is a need to identify and discuss the impact of environmental issues tourism would have on the destination.

Being the Best Airport in the World for 23 consecutive years, Changi Airport had became a popular spot with more than 70 million passengers annually. Tourism activities were viewed as one of the major economic generation sources for the country but this is often debate by the inequality impact on the environmental changes and often referred as the main contributor for emission of greenhouse gases and uses of fossil fuel (Becken