directly and indirectly, influence and support enterprises and tourists in making their operations and activities more sustainable.
5.4 Voluntary instruments
5.4.2 Reporting and auditing
Reporting allows an enterprise or organization to describe the outcome of its efforts to manage its sustainability impacts, and to share this information with stakeholders. Governments can encourage both the use of reporting within the tourism industry and the widening of the scope of its concerns. The use of an agreed set of indicators is an essential part of any reporting activity.
A sustainability reporting framework enables tourism enterprises and organizations to communicate any actions taken to improve economic, environmental, and social performance; the outcomes of such actions and the future strategies for improvement. Reporting can be undertaken at different levels:
• At the level of an individual enterprise or company or across a collection of enterprises trading in a particular tourism segment.
• For a single destination or at a regional or national level.
Why is sustainability reporting important?
Measuring and reporting both past and anticipated performance is a critical management tool. It helps to sharpen the ability of managers to assess progress towards stated social and environmental policies and goals, and is a key ingredient in building and sustaining the engagement of stakeholders. For tourism enterprises, reporting can be used to maintain and strengthen their credibility, engage their customers, gain benefit from any successes and promote market advantage.
In Scotland, the government conservation
agency has been charged by law to draw up a Scottish Marine Wildlife Watching Code which must include guidelines on activities that are likely to disturb marine wildlife, circumstances in which marine wildlife may be approached and the manner in which species can best be viewed with minimum disturbance (see Case Studies, p 172).
5
InstrumentsGrowing interest in reporting in the private and public sectors
Across the world, there is interest in enlarging the scope of conventional corporate financial reporting to include non-financial information. The growth in private sector reporting has been driven by the industry itself, and there are many voluntary reporting initiatives. The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) provides a set of reporting guidelines and sustainability performance indicators, to be used in an entirely voluntary capacity, that capture an emerging consensus on reporting practices and attempt to bring some consistency to reporting. GRI Guidelines are intended to be applicable to organizations of all sizes and types, operating in any location. A number of supplements to the GRI have been developed to capture the different sustainability issues faced by various industry sectors. Issues relating to tour operating are contained in a GRI supplement issued by the Tour Operators’ Initiative, backed by UNEP and the WTO. Other sector groups, such as representatives of the hotels sector, have also addressed reporting requirements.
Auditing activity for sustainability
Reporting may or may not be linked to an auditing process. An audit can be carried out on any organization or enterprise that has stated policies and a programme for improving sustainable performance. An audit is a systematic evaluation of the organization’s systems and actions, in order to see if it is doing what it says it will do. It can be carried out by self assessment, by the use of an independent auditor or by a third party verifier. Once an environmental management system has been established, it can be audited on a periodic basis to ensure that it is working properly and that it is doing what it should.
Auditing can be used as an internal management tool to improve performance in the tourism industry or to verify compliance with legal requirements. ‘Due diligence’ is essentially a compliance audit to test whether an organization has consistently met its legal obligations. Such an audit should trigger action or corrective measures.
An audit can also be required by a third party, to verify compliance with conditions that may have been attached to financial support or permissions. Annual monitoring reports may cover ongoing performance of project-specific environmental, health and safety and social activities, reflected in the results of periodic and quantitative sampling and measuring programmes.
How governments can promote reporting and auditing
There are a number of ways in which governments can strengthen the use of reporting and auditing as a tool in making tourism more sustainable. These include: • Governments undertaking auditing and reporting on their own activities,
including that of their agencies. This can be valuable not only in the review and adaptation of their own policies and actions, but also by setting an example to others in the tourism sector.
• Reporting more widely on the state of the sector. The performance reporting arrangements of tourism ministries or local government can be developed to
5
Instruments include reporting on progress within the tourism industry on sustainabilitytargets. Feeding this information back to the industry provides an opportunity to review policies and programmes, to take account of success and identify where effort needs to be renewed or redirected.
• Influencing the agenda for reporting. Private sector companies will often report their actions in relation to national or local environmental and social goals. • Actively encouraging the process of auditing and reporting amongst groups of
operators at a national or local level.
• Encouraging the use of auditing by introducing guidance material and offering technical assistance.
• Including an auditing and reporting requirement within recognized environmental management systems and certification processes. • Rewarding good practice by recognizing and promoting the results.
Governments may also wish to include a requirement to introduce sustainability measures into existing arrangements for corporate reporting in legislation. In France, for example, mandatory sustainability reporting was introduced in 2002 for the largest companies. Investor pressure to obtain a clearer picture of corporate performance may also lead to regulatory processes that require sustainability reporting.
Governments can require enterprises to carry out auditing and to report on the results, as part of the process of checking on compliance with agreements. The basis for approval of the Sydney Quarantine Station project provides an example (see Box 5.15).
Box 5.15: Required auditing and reporting on environmental and social impacts The North Head Quarantine Station is a site of natural and historic significance within the Sydney Harbour National Park, Australia. In 2000, the government decided that the best way of securing the future of the site would be to lease it to a tourism operator who would introduce a range of complementary economic uses. However, it was also deemed necessary for the operator to meet some serious conservation and management concerns, many of which had been raised by the local community. These latter requirements were to be formulated as conditions of the planning permission and lease criteria, but it became clear that the costs and limitations that they would impose would render the project unviable.
An alternative adaptive management solution was adopted, dependent on a process of regular auditing and reporting. This involved constant, systematic monitoring against agreed indicators, of a range of social and environmental impacts, to check that agreed optimal conditions were being met. Should impacts be found to be greater than this, agreed management responses would come into force. For example, bird breeding sites are counted regularly and their decrease would lead to measures to reduce noise, lighting and visitor movements. This model approach involves an annual Environmental Management Report on the condition of the site and the sustainability of the operation.