Environmental Impacts of Tourism: A Framework for Analysis and Evaluation

Abstract

Tourism grew rapidly during the 1960s and 1970s, but it was soon realised that this growth was not without costs. The social, cultural, economic, and environmental impacts of tourist growth became subjects of serious study and research, and entered in the policy agendas of national and international organisations. Tourism is no longer considered a ‘clean industry’ as opposed, say, to heavy manufacturing. Tourism planning is advocated as a tool for controlling the negative impacts of tourism development and for protecting the very same resources upon which the profitability of the industry depends. However, many tourism development studies and plans as well proposed policies have not been (and still are not) based on rigorous quantitative and integrated analyses of the several dimensions of tourism, neither have they placed the impacts of tourism development within the broader spatio-temporal context of their occurrence. There are many reasons for this omission, the analytical complexity of the task and the lack of proper data being among the most important of them. This chapter focuses on the environmental impacts of tourism and proposes an integrated framework for their analysis and evaluation. It is a revised version of the original chapter which appeared seven years ago in the first edition of this volume. It keeps the essential methodological orientation and gist but attempts to refine the integrated modelling framework, which was proposed originally. Moreover, it addresses explicitly the question of sustainability, which, in the meantime, became a central concern in all discussions about tourism development. The first section of the chapter reviews briefly the literature on tourism and its environmental impacts and identifies the main methodological issues in their analysis. The second section details the proposed methodological framework while the last section discusses its advantages and drawbacks.