LET THE DESERTS BLOOM

As sustainable tourism becomes a household word, many destinations and tourism players move to give a green tinge to their products and services. Nowhere is the move towards sustainable tourism as clearly visible as in Gulf Cooperation Council nations which have taken huge strides and invested billions of dollars in attempts to make the Arabian desert the global capital of sustainable tourism.

- Ranvir Nayar & Varsha Singh

What is common between an artist, an environmental activist and a sustainable development official of a large company? They all know that there are possibly hundreds of shades of green. And these are becoming ever more apparent everyday as the noise around sustainability becomes louder.

For a while now, with rising global warming and dramatic climatic catastrophes occuring frequently around the world, there has been a dramatic increase in awareness about the impact of human actions on the global environment and the urgent need for large-scale changes in the way we do everything in our lives, from manufacturing and farming to building and travelling.

Governments, but largely businesses, especially the large companies, have made big commitments to dramatically reduce their impact on the environment, with most of them settling for promises 'NetZero' carbon emissions in distant future, without any clear roadmap on how they would get there.

Most stakeholders in the global travel and tourism industry have also adopted the same fuzzy approach, while trying to appear to be in the forefront of drive towards tourism. But collectively, one region is beginning to stand out and quite surprisingly so.

An unexpected leader

Few would have expected the oil-rich Gulf Cooperation Council countries to be the ones making the fastest transition towards sustainability, notably sustainable tourism. And not just commitments or vague announcements, but real investments of trillions of dollars into ensuring that their countries become global leaders in sustainable tourism much before the Western nations, which have been the most vocal about the need to go green, but without matching their words with their actions.