Peru has become the first country in Latin America to enshrine a circular-economy roadmap as part of its climate action in tourism national policy.
On March 27th, by executive decree, Peru quietly made history. The government of José María Balcázar Zelada signed Decree Supreme N° 003-2026-MINCETUR, approving the Circular Economy Roadmap for Tourism to 2030 — the first legally binding instrument of its kind in Latin America.
The timing was not accidental. With Peru`s tourism sector preparing for COP31 in Turkey, and the Glasgow Declaration on Climate Action in Tourism — the sector’s most ambitious collective climate commitment, with over 850 signatory organizations — advocating for exactly this kind of national policy architecture, Peru stepped forward as the region’s standard-bearer. The declaration, launched at COP26, calls on all signatories to halve tourism emissions by 2030 and reach net zero before 2050. What had been a global pledge now has, for the first time in the Americas, a national legal framework behind it.
The numbers attached to the roadmap outline a significant future opportunity. While circularity is not currently a major contributor to the tourism GDP, the government projects that by 2030, the implementation of these practices could inject 1.2 billion soles (roughly $345m) into the sector’s economy.
Alongside this growth, nearly 31,000 new jobs are expected to be created in sustainable tourism activities along circular value chains. The environmental targets according to MINCETUR are equally ambitious: the mitigation of 74m tonnes of CO₂ equivalent and the restoration of more than 2m hectares of ecosystems and natural and cultural heritage.
For Minister of Trade and Tourism José Reyes Llanos, the logic is straightforward. “Tourism is one of the activities with the greatest capacity to generate opportunity,” he said at the roadmap’s official launch. “But it also faces an obvious challenge: to grow without compromising the very resources that make its own development possible.” That tension — between growth and the environmental foundations that sustain it — is precisely what the roadmap is designed to manage.
From Declaration to Decree
The roadmap emerge from one year of technical and participatory work, bringing together public agencies, private operators, academia, civil society and communities. The legal architecture is equally robust: implementation is co-supervised by both MINCETUR and the Ministry of Environment (MINAM), with a built-in mechanism for periodic revision and a sectoral commission — designed to lock in multi-stakeholders’ governance platform.
For the UN Tourism Office of the Americas, the significance of Peru’s move extends well beyond its borders. Heitor Kadri, the office’s regional representative, was unambiguous about what this moment represents for the global agenda:
“We applaud Peru’s effort to position circularity as a strategy for climate action, sustainability, and competitiveness by translating its commitment into an actionable policy instrument, in line with the requirements of the Glasgow Declaration. For the Americas, this serves as a relevant reference that may inspire other countries in the region and globally. UN Tourism will continue to actively support Peru in implementation and in sharing its expertise.” — Heitor Kadri, UN Tourism Office Representative of the Americas
