Turespaña will measure the impact of tourism on the local population in Spain, both in terms of the perception of the impact it has on their place of residence and on their personal lives.
The autonomous body of the General State Administration in charge of promoting Spain abroad plans to carry out this pioneering study next year.
The objective of the research, whose standards have been agreed upon within the framework of the World Tourism Organization and which, in the future, will be adopted by the United Nations, aims to help shed light on the relationship between the acceptance rate and variables of interest, such as population size, type of destination, tourism pressure and intensity of the destination, age, sex, level of education, occupation, etc.
As a secondary objective, the study will determine, at the destination level and at the general level, on what elements the public authorities and the sector can act to improve social sustainability in this aspect of acceptance.
Spain, world leader in measuring tourism impact
The standards of the study were agreed upon in the Statistics Committee of the World Tourism Organization, co-chaired by Spain, through Turespaña, co-chaired with Austria, which has ratified the draft statistical framework for the Measurement of Sustainability in Tourism (MST) project.
It will later be submitted to the United Nations Statistical Commission, which meets in New York in March 2024, for ratification as a UN standard.
The objective is to achieve a statistical framework that allows measuring the role of tourism in sustainable development, including the economic, environmental and social dimensions; that is, that allows measuring the impacts and dependencies of Tourism on the economy, society and the environment.
The MST will also facilitate the creation by countries of reliable and internationally comparable data on the performance of tourist destinations at the national and regional level in relation to the sustainability of tourism.
