The selected theme for this year’s World Tourism Day by the World Tourism Organisation is Tourism And Water: Protecting Our Common Future.

I consider this theme to be a very poignant and applicable one for tourism in the Maltese islands.

Tourism and water in Malta are not only inextricably related and linked with one another but also with the rest of the community.

This is where the principle of sustainability, insofar as consuming what we need for today without jeopardising future generations’ requirements and right to do the same, can be perceived and understood in the clearest of ways.

Water is a basic resource on which we all depend but that we can never take for granted, hence the need to appreciate it, protect it and use it in a sustainable manner.

Tourism can be defined as a water consumer, a waste water generator and a recreational user of water. All three types of activity have an impact on the fresh and seawater resources around us. And, as in any discussion relating to water in our small, water-poor, densely populated archipelago, we must always appreciate water consumption in terms of its impact on our stressed aquifer and the high energy cost of production by the reverse osmosis plants.

Tourists and the tourism industry consume water both directly and indirectly for their personal hygiene, laundry and swimming pool replenishment.

It is a well-established estimate that tourists generally consume as much as three times the amount of water per day in comparison with local residents and this impact cannot be ignored.

The seasonal nature of tourism, with its skew towards the hot summer season, which requires an even higher daily water usage by everyone, puts further pressures in this regard.

There have been great improvements in how a substantial number of tourism establishments have handled water use and reuse in recent years but much more needs to be done to minimise impacts even further in the coming years.

As a waste water generator, tourism also has a strong impact on our country’s aquatic resources. Waste water not only converts precious, clean water into something we need to safely dispose of but can also have an impact on one of our major tourist attractions – the sea.

Clean and clear seawater continuously emerge as being among the top attractions of Malta, Gozo and Comino to our foreign visitors and care must be taken to ensure that the very activity of tourism does not contribute to diminishing such an attraction.

While a lot has been done in terms of ensuring that sewage treatment is now the norm rather than the exception, we still need to achieve more by making better use of treated water by recycling it even further.

As a recreational user of water, both fresh as in the case of swimming pools and sea, tourism plays the paradoxical role of being both a beneficiary of impeccable water quality while, at the same time, putting immense pressures on such quality.

This gap needs to be narrowed not through the principle of compromise but through the minimising of the negative pressures and the further enhancement of high quality. Only in this way can we ensure that our water resources continue to sustain our tourism industry in the years to come.

As international tourism continues to grow worldwide, the discerning tourist of tomorrow will increasingly seek destinations that offer sustainable practices, authentic experiences and safe, healthy, uncompromised basics such as air and water quality.

Our tourism experience over the decades has shown us very clearly that we have performed best when we successfully differentiated ourselves from our lower-priced, plain offer, mass market competitors.

It is our intention to continue down this road as it is the one that ensures tourism continues to contribute to economic growth and well-being in a way which does not compromise future generations’ capability to do so too.

Tourism and water do indeed have a common future, as so rightly encapsulated by the slogan for this year’s World Tourism Day.

We commit ourselves to keep doing our best to ensure this future is healthy and beneficial to both.

Karmenu Vella is Minister for Tourism