Canterbury tourism body steps up green moves

Christchurch & Canterbury Tourism (CCT) has stepped up green initiatives as it looks for a pick-up in international visitors following a late start to the peak summer season.

Chief executive Christine Prince said CCT's efforts to become the first regional tourism organisation to earn "carboNZero" certification in New Zealand were part of a wider attempt to catch up with the green movement in Europe.

Staff with the tourism promotion body were taking home food scraps to compost at home, switching out the lights, travelling together and running air conditioning for certain hours each day to achieve the status.

"We are the first ... to achieve this status and only a handful of other tourism companies have or are working towards certification so we are definitely leading from the front in terms of helping New Zealand live up to its clean, green image," Prince said.

The carboNZero programme is administered by Landcare Research and provides a mechanism to recognise organisations which are reducing their greenhouse gas emissions and neutralising their unavoidable emissions.

CCT - under an audit process - was required to measure and manage emissions from its vehicle fleet from electricity usage and air travel. It also had to spend $3000 on offsets, including buying carbon credits through EBEX21 trading platform for native forest regeneration projects throughout New Zealand, including Canterbury.

CCT had also received Green Globe certification for the last four years, but the Landcare standard was a step up from this, she said.

CCT has hopes, based on forward bookings, that the peak summer visitor season would start to pick up from this point, particularly after a "soft October".

That month had been adversely affected by increased visits to the Rugby World Cup in the northern hemisphere, and Australia's economic slowdown.

Lincoln University tourism professor David Simmons said on Monday he had chaired a Christchurch conference to discuss tourism's future when long-haul flights as a luxury activity were being questioned. In the face of "peak oil" (where usage was outweighing cheaply sourced new oil finds) and climate-change concerns tourism needed to develop a sustainable model, he said.

"There is so much intense global pressure focusing on environmental management that tourism is now getting increasingly being caught between a rock and a hard place. It is difficult to foresee a future that supports the high volumes of tourism that we currently see."