TSDI

TSDI

Tourism Sustainable Development Index (TSDI) is an internal Murmuration project to develop a sustainable tourism development indicator based on Earth observation space data and socio-economic data.

Summary of Murmuration's study

This index makes it possible to reflect the correlation between the economic development of tourism activity and its environmental impact. It is inspired by Professor Jason Hickel's Sustainable Development Index (SDI), which aims to evolve the HDI by integrating the ecological impact dimension. 

The added value of the TSDI is, in the first instance, the addition of a tourism dimension. Indeed, one of the future objectives of the indicator is to be able to justify that climate change and mass tourism are linked phenomena and to demonstrate the ecological and economic power of sustainable tourism. Furthermore, unlike the DLI, the TSDI can assess regional or point measures, bringing higher frequency, new dimensions and better spatial resolution. The original IDD assesses developments at a country level, while the TSDI obtains a finer measure based on available data extracted from satellite remote sensing data.

Equation:

The DevelopmentIndex component measures the thematic development trend (tourism and/or urban) in the study area, and combines it with the evolution of society. This evolution is represented by the level of education as well as life expectancy.

The component EcologicalImpactIndex measures the environmental impact represented by the evolution of urbanisation, air quality, pressure on water resources and vegetation quality.

Benefits and impacts of the TSDI project

This new indicator integrating the environmental aspect makes it possible to go beyond the limits of the HDI. In fact, generally speaking, the higher the HDI of a country, the greater the pressure on the environment. This indicator therefore makes it possible to highlight human development that is more respectful of the environment.