SEDI Index Czech Republic 2025: What Happens When a Destination Methodology Is Tested at National Scale?

Tourism pressure does not stop at municipal boundaries.

Transport networks operate nationally. Energy systems extend across regions. Protected ecosystems cross administrative borders. Tourism employment, accommodation, mobility and environmental governance are shaped by national policies as well as local realities.

This raises an important question:

Following the first SEDI pilot in Split, Croatia, Green Path Alliance decided to test exactly that.

The second SEDI assessment therefore moved from a city-level destination to the national territory of the Czech Republic.

And the result was something we consider just as important as a score:

The Czech Republic assessment did not satisfy the methodological coverage requirements necessary to publish one overall SEDI number. The completed assessment contains three calculable non-governance dimensions, while Land, Ecosystems & Biodiversity and Socio-cultural Load did not reach sufficient coverage.

This does not mean that Czechia received a poor sustainability score.

It means something different:

And SEDI deliberately refuses to manufacture precision where that precision does not exist.

How to Read a SEDI Assessment Without a Score

In the Split pilot, readers could see:

• SEDI Score
• Data Coverage
• Assessment Confidence
• Drivers of Ecological Debt

The Czech Republic pilot demonstrates why the last three remain important even when the first cannot be calculated.

A sustainability index should not produce a number simply because a number is expected.

If significant portions of the assessment cannot be supported by compatible evidence, withholding the overall score can be more informative than forcing incomplete data into a calculation.

For Czechia:

• Overall SEDI Score — Not Calculated
• Non-Governance Coverage — 60.28%
• Assessment Confidence — 60 / Medium
• Calculable Non-Governance Dimensions — 3 of 5

The objective remains the same as in Split:

In this case, that also means explaining why a score should not yet be produced.

Six Dimensions Still Tell an Important Story

Even without an overall SEDI score, the assessment produced meaningful evidence.

The platform export confirms MOB at 85% coverage, WAW at 55% and ENE at 75%, while LBD and SOC fall to 30% and 25% respectively.

*The ENE result remains provisional because a technical sign-handling inconsistency was identified in ENE-01 during the reporting audit.

Tourism & Mobility: National Data Translate Well

Tourism & Mobility achieved the strongest coverage of the Czech assessment at 85% and produced a pressure score of 33.28/100.

Several indicators worked particularly well at national scale.

Czechia recorded approximately 5.41 registered overnight stays per permanent resident in 2025, calculated from 59.1 million registered overnight stays and a population of approximately 10.9 million.

The three highest-volume tourism months — July through September — represented approximately 35.87% of annual overnight stays, suggesting relatively moderate tourism seasonality when viewed nationally.

National transport-behaviour evidence also produced a 60.06% sustainable mobility share, combining walking, cycling, urban public transport, bus and rail journeys. However, the underlying national survey dates from 2017–2019 and should be replaced when the current 2025–2026 transport study becomes available.

One of the stronger pressure signals came from vehicle ownership.

This suggests a significant structural dependence on private road transport.

The one indicator that could not be calculated nationally was seasonal congestion.

City-level congestion evidence exists for Prague, Brno and Ostrava, but a city average would not responsibly represent traffic conditions across the entire Czech Republic.

That indicator therefore remained unavailable.

Waste & Water: Relatively Low Measurable Pressure

Waste & Water produced a pressure score of 22.22/100, although only 55% of the dimension was covered.

One of the strongest resilience signals in the assessment came from water exploitation.

The European Environment Agency reports a maximum seasonal Water Exploitation Index Plus of 4.1% for Czechia, occurring in Q3.

Municipal waste provided a less favourable result. The harmonised recycling/preparation-for-reuse value used in the assessment was approximately 43%.

Other Waste & Water indicators exposed a different issue.

Annual national water-consumption and municipal-waste statistics exist.

What was missing was the monthly temporal resolution required to compare peak tourism periods with the remainder of the year.

SEDI therefore did not convert annual statistics into artificial seasonal results.

Energy, Emissions & Air: A More Mixed Picture

Energy, Emissions & Air achieved 75% coverage, one of the stronger evidence levels in the national assessment.

The clearest pressure signal was renewable electricity.

Eurostat's provisional 2025 data report that renewable sources represented approximately:

The result remains significantly below the SEDI best-performance benchmark and became one of the strongest measurable environmental pressure drivers identified in the pilot.

Air quality provided a more moderate result.

ČHMÚ reported an annual national monitoring-network PM₂.₅ average of:

The figure remains above the WHO annual guideline used as SEDI's best benchmark, while representing an improvement within the Czech monitoring series.

Electricity seasonality produced an especially interesting finding.

The assessment found average July–September national electricity consumption of approximately 4,372.1 GWh/month, compared with approximately 5,101.5 GWh/month during the remaining months.

Land, Ecosystems & Biodiversity: Where National Scaling Became Difficult

Land, Ecosystems & Biodiversity achieved only:

and therefore did not produce a valid dimension score.

This was not caused by a complete absence of environmental information.

Quite the opposite.

Copernicus provides sophisticated land-sealing data.

European biodiversity systems provide conservation-status evidence.

Urban Atlas provides detailed green-space information.

Protected areas monitor visitors and ecological conditions.

The problem was matching these datasets to one national SEDI raw value without introducing assumptions.

For example, Copernicus provides artificial-sealing layers for 2018, 2021 and 2024, but no directly established Czech five-year national aggregate was available for the exact LBD-01 definition during this assessment.

Accessible urban green space is measurable for individual cities but is much harder to express meaningfully as one national Czech m²-per-resident figure.

Likewise, visitor capacity makes sense for an individual sensitive site, but Czechia does not have one national ecological carrying-capacity denominator against which all peak protected-area visitation can simply be divided.

One biodiversity value could be established.

EU Habitats Directive reporting indicates approximately 19.4% of Czech habitat assessments in favourable conservation status. This was used conservatively because the original SEDI indicator also includes sites showing improving condition.

The result is useful.

But one indicator alone is not enough to represent an entire national biodiversity dimension.

Socio-cultural Load: Strong Research, Difficult National Indicators

Socio-cultural Load achieved only:

and therefore also remained unscored.

Again, this does not mean Czechia lacks tourism research.

CzechTourism has increasingly sophisticated national visitor monitoring, including GSM-based visitor analysis and extensive resident-attitude research.

The resident survey produced one particularly positive signal.

Almost 35,000 respondents were included in CzechTourism's 2022–2024 resident-irritation research.

At national level:

• 22% welcomed tourism development
• 14% expressed a negative attitude
• 64% occupied a more neutral/balanced position

SEDI therefore used the complementary non-negative share:

Other SOC indicators proved much harder.

National short-term-rental data could not produce a sufficiently reliable unique registered bedspace count.

GSM tourism data provide extensive information about visitors and excursionists, but a single verified national peak-day visitor population was not established.

Tourism employment data exist, but not in the exact nationally harmonised monthly peak-versus-low format required by the indicator.

The information exists around the questions.

But it does not always exist in the exact form required to answer them.

Governance & Data Transparency: Strong Institutions, Incomplete Final Calculation

Governance requires special treatment in this pilot.

Two GOV indicators depend on the completed SEDI assessment itself:

• GOV-01 — Required SEDI indicator data publicly available
• GOV-02 — Indicators updated within their reporting cycle

These were temporarily recorded as unavailable during the platform assessment because their final values can only be calculated after the completed evidence audit.

They should therefore not be interpreted as Czech governance failures.

The directly assessed governance evidence tells a substantially stronger story.

Czechia operates under a national Tourism Development Strategy 2021–2030, supported during the assessment year by the Action Plan 2024–2025. The national framework identifies implementation responsibilities, timelines, outputs, indicators and financing, while sustainability and climate adaptation form part of the wider strategic approach. The assessment therefore considered Czechia to meet the highest evidence level for an active national tourism action plan.

Public performance reporting was assessed at 75/100.

CzechTourism, Tourdata and the Czech Statistical Office already publish extensive tourism-performance information. What remains missing is one consolidated national sustainable-tourism report connecting tourism management with environmental indicators, targets, methodology and year-on-year progress.

60.28% Data Coverage: Why This Number Matters

The Split pilot reached 94.44% coverage.

Czechia reached:

At first glance, the lower number may appear disappointing.

We believe it is one of the most useful results of the assessment.

Data Coverage does not measure whether Czechia is sustainable.

It measures how much of the current SEDI methodology could be supported by defensible evidence within the national assessment boundary.

The difference between Split and Czechia therefore tells us something important about sustainability measurement itself.

An indicator that works naturally for one city does not automatically work naturally for an entire country.

60/100 Assessment Confidence: Medium

The Czech assessment achieved:

This reflects both the strength of the available official evidence and the significant number of indicators that could not be populated sufficiently.

Some Czech evidence was exceptionally strong:

• official national tourism statistics;
• national population and transport data;
• EEA water indicators;
• Eurostat energy and waste datasets;
• ČHMÚ air-quality monitoring;
• national tourism strategies;
• CzechTourism resident research.

Other indicators encountered limitations involving geographic scale, data age, temporal resolution or methodological compatibility.

Confidence therefore communicates something coverage alone cannot:

What Does the Czech Pilot Actually Tell Us?

Even without an overall score, several conclusions emerge.

Czechia shows relatively low measurable national water-exploitation pressure.

National tourism seasonality is moderate compared with highly seasonal local destinations.

Resident sentiment toward tourism appears broadly positive or accepting.

The country maintains significant public tourism-data infrastructure and an established national tourism strategy.

At the same time:

• private vehicle ownership remains high;
• renewable electricity consumption remains relatively low;
• municipal waste recycling has room for further progress;
• and habitat-condition evidence indicates substantial biodiversity challenges.

But the most important conclusion is methodological.

National averages can conceal geographic concentration.

Prague does not experience tourism like a small Czech municipality.

Krkonoše does not experience tourism like an industrial region.

A spa destination does not experience seasonality like an urban business destination.

From Measurement to Improvement

SEDI is not designed to end with publication.

The Czech pilot identifies practical opportunities even without an overall score.

Why the Czech Republic Was an Important Second Pilot

Split tested whether SEDI could measure seasonal ecological pressure at destination level.

Czechia asked a different question:

Some indicators did.

Some required compromises.

Others could not responsibly be calculated.

That is precisely why the pilot matters.

A methodology should not only be tested where it works easily.

It should also be tested where its assumptions are challenged.

The Czech assessment therefore becomes:

The result is not a failed score.

It is an evidence base.

An Open Methodology Must Also Be Able to Say “Not Yet”

The Split article concluded that SEDI should remain open to improvement.

The Czech pilot demonstrates what that principle looks like in practice.

We did not lower the coverage threshold.

We did not fill unavailable indicators with arbitrary national averages.

We did not treat city statistics as automatically representative of the entire country.

And we did not create proxies where no defensible raw value could be calculated.

Where the methodology could measure something responsibly, we reported it.

Where it could not, we said so.

That is how an evidence-based methodology should develop.

Future methodological work will examine what the Czech national pilot teaches us about applying SEDI across different geographic scales.

Those findings will be published separately.

Explore the Czech Republic SEDI Assessment

Readers interested in the complete evidence can explore GP-002 — SEDI Assessment Report: Czech Republic 2025.

The report presents:

• the full national pilot assessment;
• dimension-level findings;
• indicator results;
• data limitations;
• proxy decisions;
• unavailable indicators;
• recommendations;
• technical audit findings;
• Data Coverage;
• Assessment Confidence;
• and the evidence sources used throughout the assessment.

The Czech Republic assessment becomes the second entry in the growing SEDI assessment library — and the first to test the methodology across an entire national territory.