The Tourism Authority of Kiribati (TAK) is pleased to announce the appointment of Mr. Carl Obst and Mr. Mark Lound as Sustainability Data Specialists to support the organisation and the Ministry of Tourism, Commerce, Industry & Cooperatives (MTCIC) develop suitable indicators to measure the Kiribati tourism industry performance.
Through this project, TAK aims to develop a more holistic understanding of tourism’s benefits and costs beyond the traditional measure of International Visitor Arrival (IVA) and tourism contribution to national Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita. These will include the costs and benefits to of tourism to economic development, environmental preservation and social well-being across Kiribati communities.
Carl Obst is a Director at the Institute for Development of Environmental-Economic Accounting – IDEEA Group. He was the lead author and editor of the United Nation’s System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA) – the international standard for government work on accounting for natural capital. Prior to this work, Carl had a long career with the Australian Bureau of Statistics, including time at the OECD. His current work involves projects on natural capital accounting and sustainability measurement within the United Nations system, with the Capitals Coalition and with various companies and governments in Australia and internationally. Carl is a leading player in closing the gap between government and corporate approaches to natural capital accounting.
Mark Lound has extensive statistical experience managing the statistical operations of Tourism Australia and the Bureau of Immigration and Population Research as well as leading teams across economic and social statistics at the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). Of particular relevance to this assignment, he has of recent times worked with Pacific Tourism Organisation (SPTO) and PARIS21 on a major assessment of tourism statistics in the Pacific and developed a Pacific Tourism Statistics Strategy (PTSS), the UNWTO assessing sustainable tourism statistics for Saudi Arabia, and assisted Kiribati with the analysis and presentation of results from their International Visitor Survey.
In the first part of 2022 he completed an assignment working with the ADB and Tourism Fiji to improve methodologies for measuring visitor expenditure in Fiji and provided expert oversight for the UNWTO Workshop on Measuring the Sustainability of Tourism for Asia and the Pacific.
This project is funded through the Asiad Development Banks’ (ADB) Pacific Private Sector Development Initiative (PSDI) and is scheduled to be completed in April 2023.
