Tourist behaviour change for sustainable consumption (SDG Goal12): Tourism Agenda 2030 Perspective article


Purpose
The purpose of this perspective paper is to draw attention to how the tourism industry can take action to contribute to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 12 by nudging tourists to behave in more environmentally sustainable ways. Many of the available practical approaches are easy and cheap to implement and therefore can be deployed easily by small and medium-sized tourism businesses.


Design/methodology/approach
This perspective paper reviews past contributions to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 12 and calls for more future research that develops and empirically test effective behavioural change interventions.


Findings
Future research must focus on two directions: the development and empirical testing in the field of new behavioural change interventions that entice tourists to behave in more environmentally sustainable ways, and the development and large-scale deployment of affordable instrumentation to automatically and continuously measure the environmental performance of tourism businesses.


Originality/value
This perspective paper synthesizes literature and point to important new future research directions. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first synthesis of past tourism research that has developed and empirically tested tangible approaches the tourism industry can deploy to contribute to SGD 12.
