The World Tourism Organization (
WTO)
will officially celebrate the
World
Tourism Day on September 27, 2002, in Costa Rica.
The selected theme for this day is "Ecotourism, the key to sustainable
development", with the aim of supporting the declaration by the
United
Nation General Assembly of the year 2002 as the
International
Year of Ecotourism and recognise the importance of tourism and particularly
ecotourism in sustainable development, as has been recognised in the
World
Ecotourism Summit that took place in May in Quebec and in the
publication
on sustainable tourism and the relief of poverty that the WTO launched
at the
World Summit on Sustainable
Development recently held in Johannesburg.
The WTO has expressed in a
press
release that a year after the terrorist attacks on the 11th of September
2001, with some exceptions in the politically unstable regions, tourism
is firmly back on the road towards recovery and growth.