Turismo e Agenda 2030: sistema de indicadores alinhados aos Objetivos de Desenvolvimento Sustentável para avaliar o turismo local

Abstract

Tourism is one of the fastest-growing sectors in the last 20 years. To make it more sustainable, international organizations such as the United Nations (UN) and the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), and various experts, seek to encourage the use and creation of tools to monitor the sector, to minimize its negative impacts. In 2015, the “2030 Agenda for sustainable development” was published, a global action plan developed by the UN, which brings together 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 goals to be achieved by the year 2030. In this document, tourism is explicitly mentioned in SDGs 8, 12, and 14. Goal 12. b of SDG 12 highlights the importance of developing and implementing tools to monitor the impacts of tourism. To contribute to this goal, the objective of this study was to develop a system of indicators aligned with the Agenda 2030 SDGs, capable of evaluating local tourism, using the city of Manaus (AM) as a study area. For this purpose, indicators from four pre-existing tools were selected, chosen after bibliographical research and online consultation with experts. After this selection, 38 indicators underwent adaptations to the study area and another 12 indicators were created to complement them. These processes gave rise to a system with 21 main indicators and 84 quality elements, distributed into four areas (Sustainable Management, Socioeconomic Sustainability, Cultural Sustainability, and Environmental Sustainability). To prove the system's alignment with the SDGs, a series of keywords from the indicators and their descriptions were extracted, which were later compared to the content of the SDGs and their goals. This process showed that the system is aligned to 15 of the 17 ODS, among them, ODS 16, 17, 11, and 12 are the most frequent in the system. To assess the sustainable development of tourism in Manaus, a search was made for official and public data to verify the existence of the listed attributes (or quality elements) in each indicator. The indicators had their performance evaluated according to the number of positive attributes scored. This score was elaborated using a scoring scale with four classifications ('very high', 'high', 'medium', 'low', and 'null'). The result of this assessment showed that most of the attributes served by the municipality are in the areas of Sustainable Management and Socioeconomic Sustainability. On the other hand, it was observed that indicators with low or even null scores are linked to monitoring and strategies for local tourism. In the end, the system was considered valid as it met most of the Bellagio Principles, on the other hand, it still needs improvement about the “Broad Participation” and “Continuity and Capability” principles. It is expected that this research will contribute to other studies and that this system can be improved over time, as it is not a finalized system, but an introductory one, which seeks to encourage research and actions aimed at monitoring local tourism. For future research, we recommend the use of mixed indicator systems, with participatory approaches, which seek to involve different actors, to achieve new results and contribute to the advancement of this theme.