Every now and then comes along a new list of world’s most iveable cities and in any case, everytime I see the list, it makes me think that liveable equals boring.
For example, if you take Mercer’s latest city ranking by quality of living, and you look at Asia Pacific, Auckland at number four worldwide is the region’s highest ranking city. Now much as I love Auckland and its people, I really don’t think it’d be the best city to live, work and play in.
Now take a look at the top three cities in the Mercer ranking – Vienna, Zurich and Geneva. Need I say more?
There’s more.
Mercer is not the only company to come up with an annual list of liveable cities – it covers 221 cities in its report. There’s The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Global Liveability Report on living conditions in 140 cities. There’s also current affairs magazine Monocle’s Top 25 Most Liveable Cities.
And recently, a new Global Liveable Cities Index was launched in Singapore during the World Cities Summit held in the city recently. And according to tentative findings by the Swiss-Singapore designed index, Singapore is the third most liveable city in the world, behind Geneva and Switzerland.
Need I say more?
There’s more.
The point of this article is not to argue with their findings but it made me wonder if there should be a world’s most responsible tourism destinations list, similar to the Mercer or EIU list.
I don’t mean those lists compiled by travel magazines that tout world’s top cities or world’s top beach resorts with one tourist per coconut tree or something like that, but I mean an index that measures the overall sustainability of a tourism destination.
It could be based on criteria such as how its tourist attractions are developed and managed, the management of its environment, the user-friendliness of its public transport system, the integration between local and tourist areas so that one is not alien to the other and the spread of wealth to local communities.
There are of course responsible tourism awards, specifically that run by Responsible Travel, but they go more towards individual operators and experiences and occasionally, specific destinations.
Googling the subject, I found a list of “10 best ethical destinations for 2008” but couldn’t find a list as comprehensive and similar to the Mercer or the EIU list and asking around my travel industry friends, none of them are aware of such a ranking. So if there is one, I’d love to hear more about it.
For me, one of the most important measurements of a responsible destination is the spread of tourism dollars to local communities. It breaks my heart when I go to a place like Siem Reap which is literally teeming with tourists paying every kind of tax but you see kids running around the streets and not in school where they should be.
As responsible travellers, we want to know and we should care where our money is going and surely in today’s hyper-connected world of transparency and empowerment, we should be able to develop such an index.
Having such an index and ranking would motivate destinations to do better – after all, we know the industry spends millions to get onto some list or the other, so why not put a meaningful mountain in front of it so that when you reach the top, you can literally see the new dawn and smell the fresh air.
Now that would be liveable indeed.
