Istat releases experimental statistics on environmental pressures related to tourism industries, obtained by integrating two existing accounting frameworks – the Tourism Satellite Accounts (TSA) and environmental satellite accounts.
The integrated economic and environmental account for tourism presents in a common accounting framework one economic module and one environmental module. The first one records the main economic aggregates describing tourism domestic supply and internal tourism consumption, as in the Italian TSA, already released by Istat; the environmental module, that is the pioneering part of the exercise, measures selected environmental pressures directly generated by tourism industries. In this context the estimated environmental pressures for Italy consist of air emissions causing greenhouse effect, acidification and ground level ozone as well as total intermediate consumption of energy products.
The economic and the environmental modules are both compliant with the national accounts principles and definitions and they are both broken down by a common economic activity classification. This allows to present them side by side in a common accounting framework.
Allowing to compare the economic output of tourism, measured in terms of output or value added, with the related energy use and emissions, the integrated account extends the macroeconomic description of tourism to its environmental sustainability, thereby bringing forth a high degree of value added.
Istat produced the preliminary estimates of environmental flows generated by tourism industries in the context of a pilot study carried out within the Measuring the Sustainability of Tourism (MST) initiative of the UN World Tourism Organization (UNWTO). The project, launched in 2015, with the partnership of the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD), aims at developing an international statistical framework for measuring tourism’s role in sustainable development, including economic, environmental and social dimensions.
For information
Angelica Tudini
tudini@istat.it
tel. 06 4673.3136
Emanuela Recchini
recchini@istat.it
tel. 06 4673.3199
