Impulsa Baleares claims that the cost of living for residents should be key to measuring tourism

PalmThe Impulsa Balears Foundation has defended in the European Parliament the need to incorporate residents' affordability, especially in housing and the cost of living, as a key criterion for evaluating the social sustainability of tourism development in regions with high tourism intensity like the Balearic Islands.

During a public hearing of the Committee on Petitions focused on the impact of tourism on prices and the cost of living, the entity's technical director, Antoni Riera, argued that tourism must be analyzed as a complex system that not only affects the economy but also access to housing, mobility, commerce, and the living conditions of the local population.

Riera argued that “resident affordability” should become an essential sustainability indicator, understood as the population's capacity to maintain living conditions compatible with their income in contexts of strong tourist pressure, Impulsa Balears reported in a statement. The concept he refers to, he explained, includes three dimensions: access to housing, the daily cost of basic goods and services, and the functionality of local commerce .

In this regard, the foundation has warned that factors such as rising housing costs, increased cost of living, or the replacement of traditional commerce with offerings geared towards visitors are not side effects, but structural elements that must be part of the analysis of the tourism model. Impulsa Balears has pointed out that regions with the highest tourism intensity in Spain, including the Balearic Islands, coincide with the largest increases in housing prices in the last decade.

In the case of the archipelago, household spending on housing accounts for 37.4% of the total, the highest in the country. Likewise, the report presented at the hearing indicates that the cost of the basic basket in the Balearic Islands has increased by 36.1% in the last decade, above general inflation, which reinforces the pressure on household economies. Faced with this scenario, this entity has proposed to advance on three lines: incorporate resident affordability as an explicit criterion in European tourism policies, develop comparative tools between regions to identify risks, and strengthen coordination between tourism policies and areas such as housing, commerce, mobility, or territorial planning. The intervention concluded with the idea that the debate should not focus on "how much tourism is too much", but on how to ensure tourism development capable of generating value without deteriorating the living conditions of the resident population.