At the first-ever High-Level Thematic Debate on Sustainable Tourism held at the UN headquarters in New York, Shahid said that the COVID-19 pandemic halted the entire tourism industry, dealing a “devastating blow to the global economy.”
“In 2019, prior to the pandemic, tourism contributed $3.5 trillion to global GDP. The precipitous drop during the pandemic is estimated to have cost up to 120 million jobs,” the UNGA president noted.
Though easy to sum up the devastation in numbers, capturing the overall toll on people, communities and services is much harder, particularly for many small island states and least developed countries, which remain heavily reliant on tourism to fuel public spending, he said.
Looking beyond the numbers, tourism…