Examining the demand for green events to promote sustainable practices in tourism: a concept paper

Abstract

Tourism is one of the National Key Economic Area (NKEAs) as initiatives to ensure sustainability of growth in Malaysia. One option to increase the national income is through promoting event tourism. Organizing events are highly resource intensive, and can have negative environmental consequences such as waste of water, energy and materials. Therefore, greening of events is critically important to ensure sustainability development in event management by making responsible decisions during planning, organization and implementation of an event. Sustainable event management is the process used to produce events with particular concern for environmental, economic and social issues. Identification of factors that increase the demand for sustainable events would greatly contribute to the country’s NKEAs to improve business services and generate the economy with event tourism. Thus, creating a competitive domestic economy as stated in the country’s Strategic Reform Initiatives (SRIs), by creating more green events using sustainability issues as the main attraction to increase the rate of attendance. The objective of this study is to identify the demand for green events to promote sustainable tourism.