Tourism certification has come under fire following a scathing Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) criticism of Green Globe 21, a prominent sustainable-tourism standard.

Some 500 hotels and other tourism businesses worldwide—160 of them in the Caribbean and Latin America—bear the Green Globe logo as proof of their commitment to sustainable tourism.

An independent study commissioned by WWF assessed how seven leading certification programs contribute to sustainable tourism. Citing the study, WWF claims there is no guarantee that any businesses certified by Green Globe are truly sustainable.

“The scheme is misleading, lacks credibility and is not really an indication of good performance at all,” charges Justin Woolford, international policy officer at WWF’s headquarters in the United Kingdom.

Green Globe founder Geoffrey Lipman says his company never claimed to certify businesses’ sustainability but, rather, their efforts to reduce negative impacts. Lipman says he welcomes most of the study’s “constructive criticisms.” However, he complains WWF has made the findings appear more damning of Green Globe than they actually are. “I think it’s a hatchet job,” Lipman says. “They don’t like process-based certification at WWF.”

The study, conducted by Synergy, a British consulting firm, is not as unambiguously critical of Green Globe as the WWF announcement that accompanied its release. However, it does raise serious concerns about the credibility of the London-based program, which began life in 1994 under the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC), a tourism trade association.

Overall, the report says, Green Globe “compares moderately well” to other programs and has “played a key role in the emerging tourism certification market.” Green Globe’s particular strength, the study says, is that “it can be adopted by any company in any location” and “can be especially useful in those countries where governments lack the will or resources to establish their own certification programs.”

But by trying to appeal to everyone, the report concludes, Green Globe can’t match the rigor of such regional programs as Costa Rica’s Certification for Sustainable Tourism (CST) and Australia’s Nature and Ecotourism Accreditation Programme (Neap)—two of the other certification systems evaluated in the study.

Specifically, the report calls Green Globe “misleading” for allowing companies to use its logo as soon as they agree to undergo certification. Certification can take up to two years, during which time tourists may think they are using a fully certified company.

The report also criticizes the Green Globe process itself. Green Globe certifies companies for establishing an environmental management system with their own self-imposed targets. However, this in itself does not guarantee that the company will operate in an environmentally friendly way, the report points out.

Another criticism is that Green Globe’s goals far outstrip its resources. Not only does the program seek worldwide coverage, it also claims to offer certification for all tourism sectors, even entire destinations. Yet the program is run by a “tiny secretariat of around eight people,” the report says. The result, it adds, is that Green Globe has yet to establish specific guidelines for sectors other than hotels and tour operators, and its destination program does not reflect complexity of resort-wide certification.

Lipman says Green Globe is working to improve many of the weaknesses highlighted by the report. He claims that some advances already made were not taken into account by the report. An industry veteran and former president of the WTTC, Lipman asserts that Green Globe’s pre-certification logo attracts mainstream tourism businesses that would otherwise not bother with certification. And performance-based certification, in which companies must comply with universal targets, would be far too costly for a scheme of Green Globe’s scope, Lippman argues. “We’ve never had that kind of money,” he says.

Lipman admits his program is under-funded, saying it has yet to make a profit and has not received external funding since being spun off from the WTTC last year. However, Green Globe is trying to grow by co-branding and partnering. According to Lipman, the public can be educated about the limitations of certification. He trusts that, despite current difficulties, Green Globe eventually will become the official global standard for sustainable tourism.

For its part, the WWF says it wants certification efforts like Green Globe’s to work—but without misleading the public. Says Woolford: “If you don’t have a perfect system, be honest about it. I don’t think Green Globe are being all that honest with their claims.”

Overall, the study concludes that tourism certification lags behind certification in other sectors, such as forestry. It points out that sustainability has yet to become a top priority for holiday-makers, and cites the confusing welter of certification programs (around 100), many of which have “vastly differing” requirements.

The report proposes the creation of an “umbrella body overseeing all [certification] schemes.”