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Tarek Habib, the founder of MURMURATION, delivered a profound talk about employing environmental and meteorological data to support sustainable tourism strategies.

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Tarek’s approach to sustainability elaborates assessing environmental issues with the use of data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to make tourism-related decisions across the industry. Data, data transformation and sustainability are core to him.

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Tarek mentioned that sustainability requires attention from environmental, economic and social points of view. The challenge in sustainability lies in human activities and their impact on the environment. From an anthropogenic point of view, increased pollution, land degradation, loss of natural habitats, endangered species have a destructive effect on the planet. The question is, how can we act upon the sustainability challenges? Tarek emphasised the need to identify the activists and behaviours linked to the SDGs.

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Tarek later discussed the importance of obtaining and acting upon data towards sustainability from different perspectives.

1. Travellers’ flow and reservation data help destinations to identify major attraction and visiting patterns. Such data reveals information about what and where visitors are interested to do. From an economic point of view, travellers’ flow data links to financial transactions and the economic contribution of travellers to the area.
2. Travel spending data sheds light on the type of travellers tracked to the area and their visible impact on the local economy. Such data helps destinations identify locations for best practices, understand areas that require improvement, and generally, the economic violability of the area.
3. The environmental area, increasingly requested by authorities and tourists. Such data aids understanding and monitoring and reporting upon the environmental impact of the tourism activities. Efficient use of environmental data requires specific frameworks and systematic monitoring.
4. The meteorological data demonstrate the correlation between visitors to a destination and climate change such ad urban heat. Access to meteorological data is great for addressing sustainability issues.
5. Climate data and projections forecast how the region will change in the future. Accordingly, access to such data prepares destinations to prepare and draw long-term strategies.

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Tarek reiterated that destinations must use data as indicators and put a message forward accordingly. In tourism, preservation efforts are linked to broader concepts. One of the preservation challenges in tourism is to direct visitors to other locations and activities, hence, support preservation by preventing overpopulating destinations.

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A combination of integrated data sets helps to better understand destinations from different perspectives to address current-day issues. Tarek mentioned that mixed feelings exist in relation to embracing digital and data. On the one hand, some businesses are leading the digitalisation transformation movement. On the other hand, some others, especially micro-businesses, have not yet realised the value of data, optimised websites or even google business accounts in the industry.