Sustainable Tourism Law

752 SUSTAINABLE TOURISM LAW CSD Indicators of Sustainable Development (henceforth CSD indicators) were developed between 1994 and 2001. They have been extensively tested, applied and used inmany countries as the basis for the development of national indicators of sustainable development (United Nations, 2007). Indicators perform many functions: (i) they can lead to better decisions and more effective actions by simplifying, clarifying and making aggregated information available to policy makers; (ii) they can help incorporate physical and social science knowledge into decision-making; (iii) they can help measure and calibrate progress toward sustainable development goals; (iv) they can provide an early warning to prevent economic, social and environmental setbacks and (v) they may be useful tools to communicate ideas, thoughts and values (United Nations, 2007). In 2012, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (“Rio+20”) stressed the importance of a global political commitment towards the changing world challenges. One of the most important outcomes of Rio+20 was the aim of creating a framework for global goals and indicators (Sustainable Development Goals – SDGs). Over the years, the definition of sustainable development has been difficult to define and hard to operationalize. Nevertheless, it is important to have such a definition and a model that operationalizes it (Holden et al., 2018). Measuring progress towards sustainable development has been an overarching objective of many researches as well as the European Union, enshrined in the Treaty (Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union) and it is Eurostat’s task to produce a monitoring report every two year based on the EU set of sustainable development indicators (EU SDIs) (European Union, 2013). All over as well as in the European Union there has been a long-standing experience in identifying a proper set of indicators intended to give an overall picture of whether the EU has managed to achieve progress towards sustainable development in terms of the objectives and targets defined in the EU Sustainable Development Strategy (EU-SDS) (European Union, 2013). The EU proposed an approach based on a three level of indicators (European Union, 2013): – Level 1 (Headline). These indicators monitor the ‘overall objectives’ related to the seven key challenges of the EU SDS. On the whole they are widely used indicators with a high communicative and educational value. They are robust and available for most EU Member States, generally for a period of at least five years.