Tourism for SDGs Platform (T4SDGS)

#SDGAction42847

Description

Intro

The T4SDGS platform was developed by UNWTO with the support of the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs of Switzerland (SECO) to serve as an interactive online tool. It provides a roadmap for the tourism sector towards 2030, through which all can contribute to building a smarter, more competitive, more inclusive and more sustainable tourism sector.

Objective of the practice

The ‘Tourism for SDGs Platform’ aims are to: 
– BUILD knowledge, research and good practices, from public policies and initiatives of the private sector, academia and civil society, on how tourism can contribute to advancing the SDGs; 
– EMPOWER stakeholders to integrate SDGs in their policies and operations through recommendations and examples of actions that simultaneously boost competitiveness and sustainability; 
– INSPIRE all to act and advance tourism’s contribution to the SDGs. 
 
The platform’s three main features, ‘Learn, Share and Act’, act as calls for action, conversation and collaboration towards a sustainable tourism sector: 
 
LEARN: Access information about sustainable tourism from experts, professionals and travelers from all over the world; 
 
SHARE: Share your events, initiatives, research, policy papers and stories. Show the world what you have been doing for the SDGs. 
 
ACT: See what steps you can take to help advance SDGs and how you can partner up with others wanting to make a difference.

Partners

As realizing the 2030 Agenda through tourism involves a wide number of stakeholders – platform users’ profiles were identified and divided in to six categories:
- Public bodies: for shaping and determining solid policies;
- Companies: are key business driver for sustainability and competiveness
- Donors: should increase its support to sustainable tourism;
- Travellers: can learn more about the SDGs and to be conscious of actions while travelling;
- International Organizations: should continue working with all stakeholders to advance the contribution of tourism;
- Academia and CSOs: are crucial for a better understanding and research.

Results/Outputs/Impacts

The platform received very positive feedback online. The posts announcing the launch and promoting the platform reached more than 100,000 people on Facebook and Twitter combined and received higher engagement (5,200 people engagement with the posts on Facebook and Twitter) compared to other similar posts. Since its launch, the platform received more than 36 K visits and received on average 5.2 K monthly visitors and 133 visits each day.

The T4SDGS features in the back end allows quantitative and qualitative analysis and to monitor tourism stakeholders interest and action in advancing SDGS. The analysis can be disaggregated by themes, SDGS and actor type.

This will permit to influence UNWTO agenda towards SDGS; adapt new features on the platform and share ongoing results and best practices to scale up.

Enabling factors and constraints

To ensure user friendliness of the platform and a high volume of submissions and maximize engagement, a very simple structure was developed for platform. Furthermore, the current platform has been built in order to add/change features easily with time and needs.

Several challenges were faced during the implementation process and development of the platform, including:

- Quality of submissions;
- Not user friendly on mobile device;
- Limited ways to retain users and engage new ones.

Sustainability and replicability

Two phases of the project were designed to help ensure the functionality and sustainability of the platform, i.e. phase I focusing on the pilot testing, while phase II focuses of the longer-term functionally and added features for larger-scale engagement and broader dissemination and usage of the platform resources and services.

Conclusions

The T4SDGS platform has been created to provide the global tourism community a space to learn, share and be inspired to integrate the SDGS framework with its goals and target in the policy making and business environment framework by stimulating change and adaptation. It is an agile tool which allows to measure progress over time until 2030. 
 
UNWTO is fully committed to use the T4SDGS platform for maximizing the importance of tourism for people, the planet, prosperity and peace through partnerships. The T4SDGs platform allows the organization - with its partners - to provide a common space for all global tourism stakeholders for the years to come, showing a core leadership in the field of tourism in contributing to the 2030 Agenda.

SDGS & Targets

Goal 8

Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all

Goal 16

Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels