United Nations, (Asian independent) Abdulla Shahid, President of the 76th session of the UN General Assembly (UNGA), has highlighted the need to build a more sustainable, resilient, and responsible global tourism sector as part of the “long journey” to recover from Covid-19.
At the first-ever High-Level Thematic Debate on Sustainable Tourism held at the UN headquarters in New York, Shahid said that the Covid-19 pandemic halted the entire tourism industry, dealing a “devastating blow to the global economy”, reports Xinhua news agency
“In 2019, prior to the pandemic, tourism contributed $3.5 trillion to global GDP. The precipitous drop during the pandemic is estimated to have cost up to 120 million jobs,” the UNGA President noted.
Though easy to sum up the devastation in numbers, capturing the overall toll on people, communities and services, is much harder, particularly for many small island states and least developed countries, which remain heavily reliant on tourism to fuel public spending, he said.
Looking beyond the numbers, tourism plays a deeply human role, “travel and tourism connect and unite us… builds bridges and facilitates inter-cultural exchanges…(and) fosters peace and solidarity across continents and borders”, Shahid added.
Inventive efforts were made to help tourism weather two years of Covid, including “travel bubbles”, “vaccine passports” and “resilient corridors”.
“As the pandemic wanes, the tourism sector is rebounding,” he said, speaking of “the human need to connect, to explore, to experience”.