| According
to the latest UNWTO statistics "a
record number of tourists travelled around the world in 2004 and
the number of arrivals increased by 10 per cent to reach nearly
764 million, adding nearly 70 million more tourists to the 2003
total" . The same statistics
indicate that one billion
tourists will travel around the world by the end of this decade.
These millions of people are already consuming and will continue
to demand enormous quantities of energy, water, and natural resources
to support their holidays.
The UNEP's tourism and environment programme
is operating under the Sustainable Consumption and Production
Branch. The overall objective of the SCP branch is to promote
and facilitate the extraction, processing and consumption of natural
resources in a more environmentally sustainable way over the whole
life cycle. Within this framework the resource efficiency priority
is one of the main thematic areas of our programme. The main challenges
of resource efficiency in the tourism sector are related to the
use and management of resources needed by tourism (water and energy
and use and waste management) and to the sustainable management
and operations of tourism business.
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