by Mia Taylor
Last updated: 4:45 PM ET, Mon July 23, 2018
The United Nations World Tourism Organization has launched a new online platform designed to promote greater tourism sector engagement with its Sustainable Development Goals.
The site, Tourism4SDGs.org allows users to access a variety of resources as well as share content related to tourism and sustainable development.
The UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), announced in September 2015, are an ambitious global agenda for people, planet, prosperity and peace through partnerships. They aim to end poverty, fight inequality and injustice, and solve climate change by 2030.
When announcing the goals three years ago, UN members signed onto a statement which said in part that: "billions of our citizens continue to live in poverty and are denied a life of dignity. There are rising inequalities within and among countries. There are enormous disparities of opportunity, wealth and power. Gender inequality remains a key challenge. Unemployment, particularly youth unemployment, is a major concern. Global health threats, more frequent and intense natural disasters, spiraling conflict, violent extremism, terrorism and related humanitarian crises and forced displacement of people threaten to reverse much of the development progress made in recent decades."
The statement also noted that natural resource depletion and adverse impacts of environmental degradation, including desertification, drought, land degradation, freshwater scarcity and loss of biodiversity, add to and exacerbate the list of challenges which humanity faces
The economic relevance of tourism, which represents up to 10 percent of the world's GDP and employment, makes harnessing its full potential essential for the advancement of the SDGs, the UNWTO said when launching its new platform.
"Tourism plays a vital role in many, if not all, of the 17 Goals", said UNWTO Secretary-General Zurab Pololikashvili. "Tourism has come of age as a cross-cutting economic activity with deep social ramifications, and the Tourism for SDGs Platform is providing the global tourism community with a space to co-create and engage to realize the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development."
The new site, which proclaims "Let's make tourism a driver for realizing the SDGs!" was created with the support of Switzerland's State Secretariat for Economic Affairs. It's three main features act as a call for action: Learn, Share and Act. These three levels of interaction on the platform aim not only to educate but also to encourage conversation and collaboration towards a sustainable tourism sector.
There are features on the site aimed at various users including travelers, public entities, international organizations, companies, academia and even donors.
For those who want to research current sustainable development efforts around the globe, the site has a "Find out What is Happening Around the World" search function that allows for sorting by region, country and theme. The themes include such categories as accessible tourism; biodiversity and wildlife; blue economy; climate change; ecotourism; waste management; water management and far more.
The new platform was launched during the United Nations High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development "Transformation towards sustainable and resilient societies," held in New York from July 9 through July 18.
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