Description

The project consisted of a comprehensive study of the Carbon Footprint (hereinafter, CF) applicable to rural accommodation, in which deductive, statistical and empirical methods were used to determine the systematics, variables, processes and other aspects to be identified, characterised and quantified in order to calculate the CO2 emissions of the accommodation as an indicator of its sustainability, expressed in functional units representative of the activity (night, person, year, etc.), which led to the development of a standard methodology applicable to this sub-sector.

The quality of the air and natural resources in protected environments of the Natura 2000 network, in which these establishments for inland tourism are frequently located (with Extremadura and Castilla-León as the communities with the highest occupancy rates in Spain), made it particularly relevant for this type of activity (in these territories) to direct its management towards improving its sustainability and compatibility with the environment.

To this end, direct and indirect impacts of CF at local level on the values of the protected area were identified, in order to finally establish a proposal for measures to prevent, mitigate and/or compensate for these impacts, which could be extrapolated to all rural accommodation in these territories.