From White To Green: A Proposed Environmental Management System Framework for Ski Areas

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Abstract
While still very much in its infancy, to date the evolution of sustainable tourism from concept to practice might be described as being comprised of three stages. The first has involved the development of principles, often expressed in codes of conduct or environmental policies. The second has entailed the translation of principles into 'greening' practices. The most recent third stage has centred on the implementation of environmental auditing programmes to assess the effectiveness of these practices. Environmental Management Systems (EMS) provide a management framework for guiding all of these activities towards sustainability objectives. Based on a review of literature on this subject, this paper proposes an EMS 'self-improvement' model for the North American ski area industry. It then examines the extent to which the components of such a model currently exist in or could be incorporated into these ski operations. The results indicate that the EMS model has application potential not only in the ski area industry but also in a wide variety of other tourism businesses.

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