SW England Low Carbon Tourism - REAP Tourism Footprinting Tool

Tool to allow the ecological, carbon, greenhouse gas, water and waste footprints of visitors to be calculated for the South West to inform policy and decision making (to inform green house gas emissions reduction).

Despite a growing awareness of environmental issues surrounding tourism and travel and the need for a low carbon future, there has been a lack of information, evidence and indicators to inform and drive what the regional priorities and areas for improvement should be. South West Tourism has recognised this and has been investigating how best to measure progress towards its aim to ‘meet the needs of the visitor, industry and community within environmental and social limits'.

Initial exploratory work using footprinting proved very useful and has led to the development of a bespoke tourism footprinting software tool in partnership with the Stockholm Environment Institute. The tool known as ‘REAP Tourism' has been designed to examine the environmental consequences and impact associated with visitor and tourism activities. It will help to inform future scenario planning, policy development, decision-making and prioritising action across the region.The software allows for usage in any area of the UK, and is designed to:

• measure the envrionmental impact of visitor behavour in a consistant fasion at all spatial levels
• identify areas of visitor behavour with a high envirionmental impact
• Demonstrate the impact of attracting different types of visitor to your area
• Explore the impact of promoting particular visitor behaviours
• Understand the impact of tourism in the context of lifestyles as a whole

REAP Tourism contains categories that cover the full range of expenditure associated with a visitor’s trip to an area and includes expenditure related to the visit before it happens: eg, purchase of insurance services, expenditure made during the trip: eg, spending on grocery and expenditure related to the visit after it happens: eg, spending on the return journey. There are five key footprint indicators that the model calculates; the ecological footprint, the carbon footprint, the greenhouse gas footprint and where data was available water and waste footprints.