Innovative Pathways to Sustainable Tourism in Greece: Leveraging Open Environmental Accounting and Business Ecosystems

Tourism is an important industry that can lead to economic profits while supporting the country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP). However, it can also contribute to the degradation of the environment and social infrastructure, as well as to the creation of serious inequalities. Tourism has the potential to destroy available shared environmental resources through overuse combined with poor environmental management practices and limited, or non-existent transparency in this area. The water scarcity, the depletion and degradation of natural resources, the destruction of biodiversity, the poor management of solid and liquid waste, the inadequate and dangerous infrastructure, social inequalities, etc. The current model is not sustainable and despite the efforts of businesses in the sector and state actors to shift to sustainability, the uncontrolled dominance of mass tourism remains. In this paper, the view is presented that, in order to achieve the transition to a truly sustainable tourism, tourism business ecosystems should be developed, in which environmental and social issues will involve all interested parties, such as governmental actors, and local community actors, who will draw information from an open system of environmental accounting (EA), using sophisticated tools that will provide reliable and comparable environmental information.