An approach to measuring sustainable tourism at the local level in Europe

The rich cultural and natural heritage of European countries have brought European tourism to the forefront. This status creates a need to take care of said tourism, with a particular focus on analysing its sustainability. Although several authors have pointed out the difficulties of transferring the principles of sustainable development to a specific sector, there is a consensus regarding the need to carry out an analysis at a local level, using indicators as a key tool. In this regard, it becomes very apparent that there is a need for an international set of indicators that enable an assessment of the transition towards sustainability at a local level. As yet, however, there is no widely-used approach. This paper proposes an index to measure sustainable tourism at the European NUTS 2 level, since lack of available data makes it impossible to produce indicators for cities.