A few days have passed since the last report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was published. A document that further accelerates a countdown: the one necessary to integrate effective measures to curb global warming. An appeal -one more- to a concept that is much talked about, but little has been practiced: sustainable development.
It is not new. The author of it, Gro Harlem Brundtland, who was prime minister of Norway and later president of the World Commission on Environment and Development, coined it in the report 'Our common future'. It was 1987. “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,” she said. A glove that includes the new Law for Circularity and Sustainability in Tourism in the Balearic Islands.
The certainty that without circularity and environmental sustainability any path of progress is just a mirage is the basis on which this new law is built. Its framework of action applies a specific form, the circle, to a specific but omnipresent place in its economy: tourism. It is true that there are already measures that lead the islands towards sustainable development, but not a system that has permeated enough to be truly effective.
Almost four decades after the Brundtland Report, the Balearic Islands want to capture the entire essence of this concept in the reformulation of its engine of growth and GDP: tourism, so that it serves as a beacon for the rest of the archipelago's economy and an example in other communities. What they have in hand is not only the transformation or expansion of a law, but the commitment to a paradigm shift that is not reduced to a few measures, but rather works as a complete, courageous and seamless gear. A new way of understanding the economy and redistributing resources in the fairest way with tourism as a driving force.
On this path towards comprehensive sustainability, the circular economy is postulated as an important path of progress to forge a new tourism leadership that, in turn, reinforces the sector's capacity to promote the sustainable global competitiveness of the archipelago. The transition towards the circular economy means embracing an innovative approach that allows decoupling the consumption of resources and materials from the expectations of growth and development of the sector. Something especially relevant in some islands that cannot afford to exceed their capacity and compromise their assets.
To this end, a series of mandatory measures will be imposed that challenge almost the entire tourism value chain, articulated from two perspectives: circular planning, aimed at drawing lines of action and making them operational, and circular evaluation, aimed at measuring the progress of this strategy. In this way, the Balearic Islands will be the first destination that will require companies to have circularity plans and will be pioneers in their implementation. Who will integrate them? The establishments that belong to the group of hotel accommodation, tourist apartments and rural tourism accommodation (agrotourism and rural hotels).
A circular strategy will be required of all of them embodied in a circularity plan and they will have to carry out an evaluation of the management of the resources and waste generated, supported by four pillars with a series of objective indicators to control the consumption of energy, water , materials and food.
Based on this annual evaluation, the companies will prepare a plan every five years where they will stipulate the reduction objectives and the investments, practices and protocols necessary to achieve them. In order to ensure that this circularity plan is fulfilled, the Department of Tourism will prepare a Strategic Circular Destination Plan that will basically be the roadmap that identifies the general policy and the objectives of the GOIB to guide the sector and be able to successfully achieve the transition to the circular economy.
