GSTC Sustainable Tourism Criteria

Overview

The GSTC Criteria, now called the GSTC Standards, are global baseline standards for sustainability in travel and tourism developed by the Global Sustainable Tourism Council. They are organized into four pillars covering sustainable management, socioeconomic impacts, cultural impacts, and environmental impacts including resource use and conservation of biodiversity. They exist as Destination Criteria and Industry Criteria for hotels and tour operators, with further standards for attractions and MICE venues, and they set the minimum that tourism businesses and destinations should meet. They serve as a basis for certification, policy making, and education, and conformity is confirmed through certification rather than through tradable credits.

Sources: methodology document · Global Sustainable Tourism Council

01 · Roles

The workflow as an explicit directed graph. In Graph each column is one role, so you can see who acts at each step; every node names the org.broadlistening.policy.block.* def it resolves to plus its input and output record. Data flow switches to a lineage view that makes explicit what data each node needs and makes, with dependency arcs tracing every record back to the node that produced it, including where the Darwin Core occurrence + measurement records feed in. Hover to trace, click to inspect; revise edges (dashed) send work back.

03 · Generated lexicon records

The records this methodology compiles to, ready to write to a PDS. The first tabs are the new policy engine records; the ★ claim.activity tab and those after it are reused ATProto Collective Funding Ecosystem records (org.hypercerts.*): the issued hypercert batch, its rights, an example verification attachment and a retirement receipt. The ◈ dwc.occurrence and ◈ dwc.measurement tabs are the Darwin Core field evidence the monitoring node writes; see the section below.

{
  "$type": "org.broadlistening.policy.methodology",
  "code": "GSTC",
  "name": "GSTC Sustainable Tourism Criteria",
  "registry": "Global Sustainable Tourism Council (GSTC)",
  "sector": "Tourism standard",
  "creditType": "ecotourism",
  "status": "active",
  "version": "1.0",
  "scopes": [
    "Ecotourism",
    "Certification"
  ],
  "roles": [
    {
      "id": "registry",
      "name": "Standard Registry",
      "permission": "Owns the policy, approves participants, anchors each issuance to its evidence."
    },
    {
      "id": "proponent",
      "name": "Project Proponent",
      "permission": "Registers the project and submits monitoring reports."
    },
    {
      "id": "vvb",
      "name": "Validation & Verification Body",
      "permission": "Independently validates the design and verifies monitored data."
    }
  ],
  "schemas": [
    "at://did:plc:bl0adl1sten1ngp0l1cyreg/org.broadlistening.policy.schema/gstc-criteria-eco-offer",
    "at://did:plc:bl0adl1sten1ngp0l1cyreg/org.broadlistening.policy.schema/gstc-criteria-eco-delivery"
  ],
  "graph": "at://did:plc:bl0adl1sten1ngp0l1cyreg/org.broadlistening.policy.graph/gstc-criteria",
  "issuesAs": "org.hypercerts.claim.activity",
  "workScope": "at://did:plc:bl0adl1sten1ngp0l1cyreg/org.hypercerts.workscope.cel/gstc-criteria-scope",
  "rights": "at://did:plc:bl0adl1sten1ngp0l1cyreg/org.hypercerts.claim.rights/gstc-criteria-rights",
  "createdAt": "2025-01-01T00:00:00.000Z"
}

04 · Schemas