Sustainable Tourism: The Tour Operators' Contribution

4. Product Management and Development
4.1 British Airways Holidays:
Life Cycle Assessment of a Key Destination
Description of Good Practice
To improve the planning in one of its key destinations, St. Lucia, British
Airways Holidays (BAH), the airline’s wholly owned subsidiary, and a longhaul
and city-break specialist, undertook a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)
of the island’s tourism products, to assess it as a holiday destination and
develop recommendations for how to promote sustainable tourism.
An LCA is a form of analysis used to identify inputs and quantify environmental impacts from ‘cradle to
grave’. In general, the LCA framework is based on four basic components:
1. Goal definition and scope: The tourism product(s) are identified and the required level of detail is
defined. This stage sets the time and resource constraints that will determine the depth of the study.
2. Inventory analysis: The inputs and outputs associated with the products – energy and raw materials
used, emissions to the atmosphere, discharges to water and depositions to land – are quantified. This
is known as conducting a life cycle inventory (LCI), which can be used on its own to assess environmental
issues of concern.
3. Impact assessment: The environmental impacts identified in the LCI are reviewed and the data are
classified, characterized and evaluated so that different environmental impacts can be compared and
weighted in importance. The impacts addressed include water pollution, air pollution, noise, aesthetic
damage, habitat loss, natural resource exploitation and disruption of natural cycles.
4. Improvement assessment: The results are reported and the need and opportunities to reduce the
impacts of the product on the environment are then evaluated. The feasibility of implementing changes
to lessen these impacts are then considered.
Implementation
BAH developed its LCA methodology for tourism products based on the application of the process in other
industry sectors and guidelines produced by the United Nations Environment Programme (Life Cycle
Box 1: Results of the St. Lucia LCA
The UK CEED study found that the greatest environmental impacts from tourism came from infrastructure
development and inadequate waste management. The study recommended that BAH review the environmental
performance of its suppliers, particularly hotels.
The study determined that the general impacts of tourism on St Lucia include:
• Land consumption, habitat loss and disturbance to ecosystems caused by site and infrastructure development;
• Destruction of coral reefs through increased sedimentation from land clearing for the construction of hotels
and roads, and artificial beach maintenance;
• Water pollution from hotel wastewater treatment plants failing or operating below optimum capacity;
• Inadequate solid waste management and disposal systems, which have led to the leaching of pollutants
from landfill sites; and
• Water pollution and anchor damage to reefs caused by water sports.
UK CEED also reported on the environmental impacts of all-inclusive resorts, noting that ‘All-inclusive resorts
are generally associated with significant environmental impacts. One example is the habitat loss resulting
from the construction of the Jalousie Resort between the Piton peaks in an area nominated for World Heritage
Site status. However, whilst all-inclusives tend to have greater environmental impacts than most conventional
hotels in St. Lucia, in most instances this is not because of the type of holiday package per se. Rather, it is
because all-inclusive resorts tend to be owned by international chains operating larger scale resorts, which
occupy land on the beachfront. The evidence suggests that the environmental impacts of conventional hotels
of a comparable size on the shoreline are of a similar scale. Indeed, several all-inclusives in St. Lucia were
originally built as conventional hotels and Jalousie has been converted to a non-inclusive.’
Sustainable Tourism: The Tour Operators’ Contribution