Toward a Greener Tourism Future in Lebanon
Tourism has always been one of Lebanon’s brightest sectors, bringing life, movement, and opportunity to towns across the country. But when we look closely at where this activity is actually happening, an important pattern becomes clear: tourism is not spread evenly. It is concentrated intensely in just a handful of towns. And with that concentration comes one of Lebanon’s biggest hidden challenges: environmental pressure.
Restaurants, cafés, and hotels create jobs, attract visitors, and fuel local economies, but they also generate large amounts of waste, rely heavily on single-use plastics, and demand significant water and electricity. When these establishments cluster together in small areas, the strain on municipal systems becomes visible faster than the benefits.
To understand this pressure, we visualized the distribution of tourism establishments across the top 10 tourism towns in Lebanon. The result was striking. Two towns, Aabbesiyi and Baalbek stood far above the rest.
Aabbesiyi hosts 30 restaurants, 25 cafés, and 4 hotels. Baalbek hosts 39 restaurants, 10 cafés, and 2 hotels. Together, they make up 55% of all tourism establishments among the top towns.
This isn’t a small detail. This is the story.
These two towns carry more tourism activity, more food and packaging waste, more daily electricity and water consumption, and more visitor movement than anywhere else. And because the environmental impact is highest where the activity is highest, this concentration creates an opportunity that Lebanon has never fully used: beginning sustainability efforts where they matter most.
Instead of trying to build a national sustainability plan all at once, we can start with a focused, practical approach. Aabbesiyi and Baalbek are ideal places to pilot a Sustainable Tourism Starter Program, a coordinated effort that brings together cafés, restaurants, hotels, municipalities, and visitors under a simple goal: reducing the environmental footprint of the tourism experience.
Why start here?
Because here, the impact is immediate.
Because here, businesses are clustered close enough to benefit from shared guidelines and joint awareness efforts.
Because here, improvements don’t just make environmental sense, they make social and economic sense too.
Global sustainable tourism frameworks follow the same principle: begin where tourism activity is heaviest. It creates quicker results, easier monitoring, and a clearer path for scaling what works. And both Aabbesiyi and Baalbek already have something many towns lack: active business communities, strong visibility, and a steady visitor flow that makes sustainability initiatives more likely to succeed.
From shared sustainability guidelines to town-level branding like “Green Aabbesiyi” and “Eco-Baalbek,” these hubs can become the first Lebanese destinations to embrace environmental responsibility as part of their identity. With support from NGOs, municipal authorities, schools, and local partners, the program can grow beyond awareness campaigns into a committed, long-term approach to managing waste, water, energy, and visitor behavior. And once we see the impact, once the model proves itself, the same practices can be adopted by other towns, one step at a time.
Our visualization points to one undeniable truth: not all tourism towns carry the same environmental weight. Turning this insight into action gives Lebanon a real chance to move toward a greener tourism future, starting exactly where impact will be felt most.
