Ecological Footprint and Life Cycle Assessment in the sustainability assessment of tourism activities

Abstract

Within the recent debate about the needs for improving Ecological Footprint (EF) method, Kitzes and colleagues highlighted the necessity of standardised and detailed Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) studies to support the calculation of specific impacts accounted in EF. As EF has been identified as a useful method for the evaluation of sustainability of tourism activities, this article presents a comparative study about sustainability evaluation of tourism activities, including LCA of a holiday and a hotel structure. The methodology for a joint use of the two methods was expected to provide more robust and detailed sustainability assessment as LCA is more comprehensive in terms of coverage of impact categories but disregard the carrying capacity of the system/limit of resource assessed by EF. The methodology was applied to two case studies in Northern Italy. The case studies showed that there is a correlation between the results of the two assessments, due to the relevance of energy and fossil fuel consumption as main drivers of impact.