Our World
in Data
Data

Monitoring of sustainable tourism

See all data and research on:
Tourism

What you should know about this indicator

  • The Tourism Satellite Account (TSA) and System of Environmental and Economic Accounts (SEEA) are standardized methods used by countries to measure the economic and environmental impacts of tourism.
  • TSA tables track economic aspects of tourism, such as tourist spending, the production of tourism-related goods and services, and employment in the tourism sector.
  • SEEA tables monitor environmental impacts, including the consumption of resources like water and energy, as well as the emission of greenhouse gases and generation of waste by the tourism industry.
  • National governments or statistical agencies collect and organize data into these tables to understand tourism's influence on the economy and environment.
  • The number of tables implemented indicates how comprehensively tourism's impacts are being tracked, with more tables providing a more detailed and nuanced understanding.
Monitoring of sustainable tourism
Monitoring is expressed as the number of data tables implemented within the Tourism Satellite Account (TSA) and the System of Environmental and Economic Accounts (SEEA). These tables organize and track key economic and environmental aspects of tourism, such as expenditure, production, employment, and resource flows.
Source
UNWTO (2024) – processed by Our World in Data
Last updated
August 17, 2024
Next expected update
August 2025
Date range
2008–2022
Unit
tables

Related research and writing

Sustainable development goal 12: Responsible Consumption and Production

Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns

Our World in Data team

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

Indicator 12.b.1 shows the preparedness of countries to “develop and implement tools to monitor sustainable development impacts for sustainable tourism” called for in target 12.b under Goal 12 on Sustainable Consumption and Production.

More specifically, it tracks the implementation of the most relevant Tourism Satellite Account (TSA) and System of Environmental Economic Accounting (SEEA) tables.

Retrieved on
August 17, 2024
Retrieved from
https://www.unwto.org/tourism-statistics/economic-contribution-SDG
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
World Tourism Organization (2024),Implementation of standards accounting tools to monitor the economic and environmental aspects of tourism sustainability, UNWTO, Madrid:
https://www.unwto.org/tourism-statistics/economic-contribution-SDG [17-08-2024].

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Monitoring of sustainable tourism”, part of the following publication: Bastian Herre and Veronika Samborska (2023) - “Tourism”. Data adapted from UNWTO. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/implementation-of-tools-to-monitor-economic-and-environmental-tourism [online resource]
How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

UNWTO (2024) – processed by Our World in Data

Full citation

UNWTO (2024) – processed by Our World in Data. “Monitoring of sustainable tourism” [dataset]. UNWTO, “Implementation of standards accounting tools to monitor the economic and environmental aspects of tourism sustainability” [original data]. Retrieved November 22, 2024 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/implementation-of-tools-to-monitor-economic-and-environmental-tourism