Are you interested in tourism and sustainable development? Do you wish to acquire in-depth knowledge about how to evaluate tourism and plan for future tourism from a sustainability perspective?

This Master’s programme in Tourism and Sustainability takes on the challenges that climate change and sustainability issues bring about for the tourism and travel industry. As a truly global business with ties all across the globe, tourism links together the most remote places in a gigantic web of relations in environment, politics, geography, economy, the social and the cultural.

As a globally leading business industry, the tourism industry has to take responsibility for the planet’s limitations. Tourism and Sustainability provides you with an insight into the paramount challenges that face the tourism industry’s development and our world. You will acquire skills that enable you to grapple with important and often contradictory trajectories of tourism and its sustainable future. This can be, for instance, how tourists often seek the pristine, the authentic or the genuine, while in doing so also burden destinations and travel system through unsustainable patterns of practices and carbon dioxide emissions. On a larger scale, it is not only the tourism industry that is under threat but also the world as we know it. Therefore, the most central question we ask ourselves on the Master’s programme in Tourism and Sustainability is – how do we create the tourism industry of the future?

On the first year, you are introduced to tourism as an academic subject with ethics, justice, social, environmental and historical perspectives. The course Tourism in the Anthropocene addresses tourism in a new geological era where the living conditions of humanity challenge the planetary boundaries and, to an ever increasing extent, determine the future of our planet. The courses Business models for sustainability, Evaluation and planning of tourism sustainability, Developing sustainable destinations, and Environmental economics, focus on finding solutions and viable paths forward. On the second year, you will get thorough methodological training and the opportunity to carry out an internship or study elective courses, before the final semester’s degree project (30 credits).

Career perspectives

In the large tourism sector there is a growing need for qualified expertise in evaluating, analyzing and planning for tourism and tourism-related activities in a sustainability perspective. The program provides these skills and prepares students for advanced jobs in the private as well as public sector.