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Langkawi Nature Blogs
What Does Sustainability in Tourism Really Mean and Require?
Mark: 16 Oct. 2009
As announced only today - there will be a lecture organised by MNS (Malaysia Nature Society) Langkawi, with the above title.
Speaker : Mr Klaus Lengefeld - Senior Adviser
in Sustainable Tourism – Germany
Date: Monday, 19 October 2009
Time: 2.00pm – 4.00pm
Venue: LADA Auditorium, Langkawi
This is a great opportunity for stake holders and tourism industries players to learn and benefit from his experiences.
Please send response via sms to me at 012 5486184 if you like to attend this talk.
Speaker Background:
Klaus Lengefeld is Senior Advisor for Tourism and Sustainable Development with GTZ, German Technical Cooperation Agency. After a postgraduate in rural development at Technical University Berlin in 1985, he started to work for GTZ’s departments for rural and appropriate technologies in 1986 with focus on Latin America and NGO cooperation.
In 1997, Klaus started to prepare the German development cooperation’s so-far biggest and most ambitious tourism project, the supraregional “FODESTUR” – Fostering Sustainable Development through Tourism in Central America, which helped to reposition the region and give it a corporate identity under the “Centroamérica – so little and yet so much” slogan. Back from this project which he managed from Managua, Nicaragua from 1999 to 2002, he started from the GTZ headquarter a comprehensive work on the contribution of tourism for sustainable development.
Having understood the huge socio-economic potential of mainstream All-Inclusive and luxury tourism when working with a resort in Nicaragua, and when realizing that there is no research on money flows from this types of holidays, Klaus started the research on economic contributions of mainstream and luxury tourism with 8 All-Inclusive Resorts in Dominican Republic, Jamaica and Nicaragua and upmarket brands in the Maldives, Thailand, Mauritius and Dubai. His surprisingly positive findings on the contribution of mainstream and luxury tourism to poverty alleviation are now being discussed worldwide, and have helped to initiate initiatives to further use this potential, such as the Gambia example where local farmers have been trained to deliver food to beach hotels, a project supported by the UK Travel Foundation.
The next step which Klaus Lengefeld is currently involved in is to integrate all sustainability issues from minimizing the Eco- and Carbon footprint to maximizing positive socio-economic and socio-cultural effects into the planning and development of major resorts and destination developments around the world, in order to show that his credo is making real business: “sustainability sells !”.
