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The role of tourism in sustainable development.

Robert B. Richardson Robert B. Richardson Community Sustainability, Michigan State University
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199389414.013.387
Published online: 25 March 2021

Sustainable development is the foundational principle for enhancing human and economic development while maintaining the functional integrity of ecological and social systems that support regional economies. Tourism has played a critical role in sustainable development in many countries and regions around the world. In developing countries, tourism development has been used as an important strategy for increasing economic growth, alleviating poverty, creating jobs, and improving food security. Many developing countries are in regions that are characterized by high levels of biological diversity, natural resources, and cultural heritage sites that attract international tourists whose local purchases generate income and support employment and economic development. Tourism has been associated with the principles of sustainable development because of its potential to support environmental protection and livelihoods. However, the relationship between tourism and the environment is multifaceted, as some types of tourism have been associated with negative environmental impacts, many of which are borne by host communities.

The concept of sustainable tourism development emerged in contrast to mass tourism, which involves the participation of large numbers of people, often in structured or packaged tours. Mass tourism has been associated with economic leakage and dependence, along with negative environmental and social impacts. Sustainable tourism development has been promoted in various ways as a framing concept in contrast to these economic, environmental, and social impacts. Some literature has acknowledged a vagueness of the concept of sustainable tourism, which has been used to advocate for fundamentally different strategies for tourism development that may exacerbate existing conflicts between conservation and development paradigms. Tourism has played an important role in sustainable development in some countries through the development of alternative tourism models, including ecotourism, community-based tourism, pro-poor tourism, slow tourism, green tourism, and heritage tourism, among others that aim to enhance livelihoods, increase local economic growth, and provide for environmental protection. Although these models have been given significant attention among researchers, the extent of their implementation in tourism planning initiatives has been limited, superficial, or incomplete in many contexts.

The sustainability of tourism as a global system is disputed among scholars. Tourism is dependent on travel, and nearly all forms of transportation require the use of non-renewable resources such as fossil fuels for energy. The burning of fossil fuels for transportation generates emissions of greenhouse gases that contribute to global climate change, which is fundamentally unsustainable. Tourism is also vulnerable to both localized and global shocks. Studies of the vulnerability of tourism to localized shocks include the impacts of natural disasters, disease outbreaks, and civil unrest. Studies of the vulnerability of tourism to global shocks include the impacts of climate change, economic crisis, global public health pandemics, oil price shocks, and acts of terrorism. It is clear that tourism has contributed significantly to economic development globally, but its role in sustainable development is uncertain, debatable, and potentially contradictory.

conservation
economic development
environmental impacts
sustainable development
sustainable tourism
tourism development

Introduction

Sustainable development is the guiding principle for advancing human and economic development while maintaining the integrity of ecosystems and social systems on which the economy depends. It is also the foundation of the leading global framework for international cooperation—the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (United Nations, 2015 ). The concept of sustainable development is often associated with the publication of Our Common Future (World Commission on Environment and Development [WCED], 1987 , p. 29), which defined it as “paths of human progress that meet the needs and aspirations of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.” Concerns about the environmental implications of economic development in lower income countries had been central to debates about development studies since the 1970s (Adams, 2009 ). The principles of sustainable development have come to dominate the development discourse, and the concept has become the primary development paradigm since the 1990s.

Tourism has played an increasingly important role in sustainable development since the 1990s, both globally and in particular countries and regions. For decades, tourism has been promoted as a low-impact, non-extractive option for economic development, particularly for developing countries (Gössling, 2000 ). Many developing countries have managed to increase their participation in the global economy through development of international tourism. Tourism development is increasingly viewed as an important tool in increasing economic growth, alleviating poverty, and improving food security. Tourism enables communities that are poor in material wealth, but rich in history and cultural heritage, to leverage their unique assets for economic development (Honey & Gilpin, 2009 ). More importantly, tourism offers an alternative to large-scale development projects, such as construction of dams, and to extractive industries such as mining and forestry, all of which contribute to emissions of pollutants and threaten biodiversity and the cultural values of Indigenous Peoples.

Environmental quality in destination areas is inextricably linked with tourism, as visiting natural areas and sightseeing are often the primary purpose of many leisure travels. Some forms of tourism, such as ecotourism, can contribute to the conservation of biodiversity and the protection of ecosystem functions in destination areas (Fennell, 2020 ; Gössling, 1999 ). Butler ( 1991 ) suggests that there is a kind of mutual dependence between tourism and the environment that should generate mutual benefits. Many developing countries are in regions that are characterized by high levels of species diversity, natural resources, and protected areas. Such ideas imply that tourism may be well aligned with the tenets of sustainable development.

However, the relationship between tourism and the environment is complex, as some forms of tourism have been associated with negative environmental impacts, including greenhouse gas emissions, freshwater use, land use, and food consumption (Butler, 1991 ; Gössling & Peeters, 2015 ; Hunter & Green, 1995 ; Vitousek et al., 1997 ). Assessments of the sustainability of tourism have highlighted several themes, including (a) parks, biodiversity, and conservation; (b) pollution and climate change; (c) prosperity, economic growth, and poverty alleviation; (d) peace, security, and safety; and (e) population stabilization and reduction (Buckley, 2012 ). From a global perspective, tourism contributes to (a) changes in land cover and land use; (b) energy use, (c) biotic exchange and extinction of wild species; (d) exchange and dispersion of diseases; and (e) changes in the perception and understanding of the environment (Gössling, 2002 ).

Research on tourism and the environment spans a wide range of social and natural science disciplines, and key contributions have been disseminated across many interdisciplinary fields, including biodiversity conservation, climate science, economics, and environmental science, among others (Buckley, 2011 ; Butler, 1991 ; Gössling, 2002 ; Lenzen et al., 2018 ). Given the global significance of the tourism sector and its environmental impacts, the role of tourism in sustainable development is an important topic of research in environmental science generally and in environmental economics and management specifically. Reviews of tourism research have highlighted future research priorities for sustainable development, including the role of tourism in the designation and expansion of protected areas; improvement in environmental accounting techniques that quantify environmental impacts; and the effects of individual perceptions of responsibility in addressing climate change (Buckley, 2012 ).

Tourism is one of the world’s largest industries, and it has linkages with many of the prime sectors of the global economy (Fennell, 2020 ). As a global economic sector, tourism represents one of the largest generators of wealth, and it is an important agent of economic growth and development (Garau-Vadell et al., 2018 ). Tourism is a critical industry in many local and national economies, and it represents a large and growing share of world trade (Hunter, 1995 ). Global tourism has had an average annual increase of 6.6% over the past half century, with international tourist arrivals rising sharply from 25.2 million in 1950 to more than 950 million in 2010 . In 2019 , the number of international tourists reached 1.5 billion, up 4% from 2018 (Fennell, 2020 ; United Nations World Tourism Organization [UNWTO], 2020 ). European countries are host to more than half of international tourists, but since 1990 , growth in international arrivals has risen faster than the global average, in both the Middle East and the Asia and Pacific region (UNWTO, 2020 ).

The growth in global tourism has been accompanied by an expansion of travel markets and a diversification of tourism destinations. In 1950 , the top five travel destinations were all countries in Europe and the Americas, and these destinations held 71% of the global travel market (Fennell, 2020 ). By 2002 , these countries represented only 35%, which underscores the emergence of newly accessible travel destinations in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and the Pacific Rim, including numerous developing countries. Over the past 70 years, global tourism has grown significantly as an economic sector, and it has contributed to the economic development of dozens of nations.

Given the growth of international tourism and its emergence as one of the world’s largest export sectors, the question of its impact on economic growth for the host countries has been a topic of great interest in the tourism literature. Two hypotheses have emerged regarding the role of tourism in the economic growth process (Apergis & Payne, 2012 ). First, tourism-led growth hypothesis relies on the assumption that tourism is an engine of growth that generates spillovers and positive externalities through economic linkages that will impact the overall economy. Second, the economic-driven tourism growth hypothesis emphasizes policies oriented toward well-defined and enforceable property rights, stable political institutions, and adequate investment in both physical and human capital to facilitate the development of the tourism sector. Studies have concluded with support for both the tourism-led growth hypothesis (e.g., Durbarry, 2004 ; Katircioglu, 2010 ) and the economic-led growth hypothesis (e.g., Katircioglu, 2009 ; Oh, 2005 ), whereas other studies have found support for a bidirectional causality for tourism and economic growth (e.g., Apergis & Payne, 2012 ; Lee & Chang, 2008 ).

The growth of tourism has been marked by an increase in the competition for tourist expenditures, making it difficult for destinations to maintain their share of the international tourism market (Butler, 1991 ). Tourism development is cyclical and subject to short-term cycles and overconsumption of resources. Butler ( 1980 ) developed a tourist-area cycle of evolution that depicts the number of tourists rising sharply over time through periods of exploration, involvement, and development, before eventual consolidation and stagnation. When tourism growth exceeds the carrying capacity of the area, resource degradation can lead to the decline of tourism unless specific steps are taken to promote rejuvenation (Butler, 1980 , 1991 ).

The potential of tourism development as a tool to contribute to environmental conservation, economic growth, and poverty reduction is derived from several unique characteristics of the tourism system (UNWTO, 2002 ). First, tourism represents an opportunity for economic diversification, particularly in marginal areas with few other export options. Tourists are attracted to remote areas with high values of cultural, wildlife, and landscape assets. The cultural and natural heritage of developing countries is frequently based on such assets, and tourism represents an opportunity for income generation through the preservation of heritage values. Tourism is the only export sector where the consumer travels to the exporting country, which provides opportunities for lower-income households to become exporters through the sale of goods and services to foreign tourists. Tourism is also labor intensive; it provides small-scale employment opportunities, which also helps to promote gender equity. Finally, there are numerous indirect benefits of tourism for people living in poverty, including increased market access for remote areas through the development of roads, infrastructure, and communication networks. Nevertheless, travel is highly income elastic and carbon intensive, which has significant implications for the sustainability of the tourism sector (Lenzen et al., 2018 ).

Concerns about environmental issues appeared in tourism research just as global awareness of the environmental impacts of human activities was expanding. The United Nations Conference on the Human Environment was held in Stockholm in 1972 , the same year as the publication of The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al., 1972 ), which highlighted the concerns about the implications of exponential economic and population growth in a world of finite resources. This was the same year that the famous Blue Marble photograph of Earth was taken by the crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft (Höhler, 2015 , p. 10), and the image captured the planet cloaked in the darkness of space and became a symbol of Earth’s fragility and vulnerability. As noted by Buckley ( 2012 ), tourism researchers turned their attention to social and environmental issues around the same time (Cohen, 1978 ; Farrell & McLellan, 1987 ; Turner & Ash, 1975 ; Young, 1973 ).

The notion of sustainable development is often associated with the publication of Our Common Future , the report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, also known as the Brundtland Commission (WCED, 1987 ). The report characterized sustainable development in terms of meeting “the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (WCED, 1987 , p. 43). Four basic principles are fundamental to the concept of sustainability: (a) the idea of holistic planning and strategy making; (b) the importance of preserving essential ecological processes; (c) the need to protect both human heritage and biodiversity; and (d) the need to develop in such a way that productivity can be sustained over the long term for future generations (Bramwell & Lane, 1993 ). In addition to achieving balance between economic growth and the conservation of natural resources, there should be a balance of fairness and opportunity between the nations of the world.

Although the modern concept of sustainable development emerged with the publication of Our Common Future , sustainable development has its roots in ideas about sustainable forest management that were developed in Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries (Blewitt, 2015 ; Grober, 2007 ). Sustainable forest management is concerned with the stewardship and use of forests in a way that maintains their biodiversity, productivity, and regeneration capacity as well as their potential to fulfill society’s demands for forest products and benefits. Building on these ideas, Daly ( 1990 ) offered two operational principles of sustainable development. First, sustainable development implies that harvest rates should be no greater than rates of regeneration; this concept is known as maximum sustainable yield. Second, waste emission rates should not exceed the natural assimilative capacities of the ecosystems into which the wastes are emitted. Regenerative and assimilative capacities are characterized as natural capital, and a failure to maintain these capacities is not sustainable.

Shortly after the emergence of the concept of sustainable development in academic and policy discourse, tourism researchers began referring to the notion of sustainable tourism (May, 1991 ; Nash & Butler, 1990 ), which soon became the dominant paradigm of tourism development. The concept of sustainable tourism, as with the role of tourism in sustainable development, has been interpreted in different ways, and there is a lack of consensus concerning its meaning, objectives, and indicators (Sharpley, 2000 ). Growing interest in the subject inspired the creation of a new academic journal, Journal of Sustainable Tourism , which was launched in 1993 and has become a leading tourism journal. It is described as “an international journal that publishes research on tourism and sustainable development, including economic, social, cultural and political aspects.”

The notion of sustainable tourism development emerged in contrast to mass tourism, which is characterized by the participation of large numbers of people, often provided as structured or packaged tours. Mass tourism has risen sharply in the last half century. International arrivals alone have increased by an average annual rate of more than 25% since 1950 , and many of those trips involved mass tourism activities (Fennell, 2020 ; UNWTO, 2020 ). Some examples of mass tourism include beach resorts, cruise ship tourism, gaming casinos, golf resorts, group tours, ski resorts, theme parks, and wildlife safari tourism, among others. Little data exist regarding the volume of domestic mass tourism, but nevertheless mass tourism activities dominate the global tourism sector. Mass tourism has been shown to generate benefits to host countries, such as income and employment generation, although it has also been associated with economic leakage (where revenue generated by tourism is lost to other countries’ economies) and economic dependency (where developing countries are dependent on wealthier countries for tourists, imports, and foreign investment) (Cater, 1993 ; Conway & Timms, 2010 ; Khan, 1997 ; Peeters, 2012 ). Mass tourism has been associated with numerous negative environmental impacts and social impacts (Cater, 1993 ; Conway & Timms, 2010 ; Fennell, 2020 ; Ghimire, 2013 ; Gursoy et al., 2010 ; Liu, 2003 ; Peeters, 2012 ; Wheeller, 2007 ). Sustainable tourism development has been promoted in various ways as a framing concept in contrast to many of these economic, environmental, and social impacts.

Much of the early research on sustainable tourism focused on defining the concept, which has been the subject of vigorous debate (Bramwell & Lane, 1993 ; Garrod & Fyall, 1998 ; Hunter, 1995 ; Inskeep, 1991 ; Liu, 2003 ; Sharpley, 2000 ). Early definitions of sustainable tourism development seemed to fall in one of two categories (Sharpley, 2000 ). First, the “tourism-centric” paradigm of sustainable tourism development focuses on sustaining tourism as an economic activity (Hunter, 1995 ). Second, alternative paradigms have situated sustainable tourism in the context of wider sustainable development policies (Butler, 1991 ). One of the most comprehensive definitions of sustainable tourism echoes some of the language of the Brundtland Commission’s definition of sustainable development (WCED, 1987 ), emphasizing opportunities for the future while also integrating social and environmental concerns:

Sustainable tourism can be thought of as meeting the needs of present tourists and host regions while protecting and enhancing opportunity for the future. Sustainable tourism development is envisaged as leading to management of all resources in such a way that we can fulfill economic, social and aesthetic needs while maintaining cultural integrity, essential ecological processes, biological diversity and life support systems. (Inskeep, 1991 , p. 461)

Hunter argued that over the short and long terms, sustainable tourism development should

“meet the needs and wants of the local host community in terms of improved living standards and quality of life;

satisfy the demands of tourists and the tourism industry, and continue to attract them in order to meet the first aim; and

safeguard the environmental resource base for tourism, encompassing natural, built and cultural components, in order to achieve both of the preceding aims.” (Hunter, 1995 , p. 156)

Numerous other definitions have been documented, and the term itself has been subject to widespread critique (Buckley, 2012 ; Hunter, 1995 ; Liu, 2003 ). Nevertheless, there have been numerous calls to move beyond debate about a definition and to consider how it may best be implemented in practice (Garrod & Fyall, 1998 ; Liu, 2003 ). Cater ( 1993 ) identified three key criteria for sustainable tourism: (a) meeting the needs of the host population in terms of improved living standards both in the short and long terms; (b) satisfying the demands of a growing number of tourists; and (c) safeguarding the natural environment in order to achieve both of the preceding aims.

Some literature has acknowledged a vagueness of the concept of sustainable tourism, which has been used to advocate for fundamentally different strategies for tourism development that may exacerbate existing conflicts between conservation and development paradigms (Garrod & Fyall, 1998 ; Hunter, 1995 ; Liu, 2003 ; McKercher, 1993b ). Similar criticisms have been leveled at the concept of sustainable development, which has been described as an oxymoron with a wide range of meanings (Adams, 2009 ; Daly, 1990 ) and “defined in such a way as to be either morally repugnant or logically redundant” (Beckerman, 1994 , p. 192). Sharpley ( 2000 ) suggests that in the tourism literature, there has been “a consistent and fundamental failure to build a theoretical link between sustainable tourism and its parental paradigm,” sustainable development (p. 2). Hunter ( 1995 ) suggests that practical measures designed to operationalize sustainable tourism fail to address many of the critical issues that are central to the concept of sustainable development generally and may even actually counteract the fundamental requirements of sustainable development. He suggests that mainstream sustainable tourism development is concerned with protecting the immediate resource base that will sustain tourism development while ignoring concerns for the status of the wider tourism resource base, such as potential problems associated with air pollution, congestion, introduction of invasive species, and declining oil reserves. The dominant paradigm of sustainable tourism development has been described as introverted, tourism-centric, and in competition with other sectors for scarce resources (McKercher, 1993a ). Hunter ( 1995 , p. 156) proposes an alternative, “extraparochial” paradigm where sustainable tourism development is reconceptualized in terms of its contribution to overall sustainable development. Such a paradigm would reconsider the scope, scale, and sectoral context of tourism-related resource utilization issues.

“Sustainability,” “sustainable tourism,” and “sustainable development” are all well-established terms that have often been used loosely and interchangeably in the tourism literature (Liu, 2003 ). Nevertheless, the subject of sustainable tourism has been given considerable attention and has been the focus of numerous academic compilations and textbooks (Coccossis & Nijkamp, 1995 ; Hall & Lew, 1998 ; Stabler, 1997 ; Swarbrooke, 1999 ), and it calls for new approaches to sustainable tourism development (Bramwell & Lane, 1993 ; Garrod & Fyall, 1998 ; Hunter, 1995 ; Sharpley, 2000 ). The notion of sustainable tourism has been reconceptualized in the literature by several authors who provided alternative frameworks for tourism development (Buckley, 2012 ; Gössling, 2002 ; Hunter, 1995 ; Liu, 2003 ; McKercher, 1993b ; Sharpley, 2000 ).

Early research in sustainable tourism focused on the local environmental impacts of tourism, including energy use, water use, food consumption, and change in land use (Buckley, 2012 ; Butler, 1991 ; Gössling, 2002 ; Hunter & Green, 1995 ). Subsequent research has emphasized the global environmental impacts of tourism, such as greenhouse gas emissions and biodiversity losses (Gössling, 2002 ; Gössling & Peeters, 2015 ; Lenzen et al., 2018 ). Additional research has emphasized the impacts of environmental change on tourism itself, including the impacts of climate change on tourist behavior (Gössling et al., 2012 ; Richardson & Loomis, 2004 ; Scott et al., 2012 ; Viner, 2006 ). Countries that are dependent on tourism for economic growth may be particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change (Richardson & Witkoswki, 2010 ).

The early focus on environmental issues in sustainable tourism has been broadened to include economic, social, and cultural issues as well as questions of power and equity in society (Bramwell & Lane, 1993 ; Sharpley, 2014 ), and some of these frameworks have integrated notions of social equity, prosperity, and cultural heritage values. Sustainable tourism is dependent on critical long-term considerations of the impacts; notions of equity; an appreciation of the importance of linkages (i.e., economic, social, and environmental); and the facilitation of cooperation and collaboration between different stakeholders (Elliott & Neirotti, 2008 ).

McKercher ( 1993b ) notes that tourism resources are typically part of the public domain or are intrinsically linked to the social fabric of the host community. As a result, many commonplace tourist activities such as sightseeing may be perceived as invasive by members of the host community. Many social impacts of tourism can be linked to the overuse of the resource base, increases in traffic congestion, rising land prices, urban sprawl, and changes in the social structure of host communities. Given the importance of tourist–resident interaction, sustainable tourism development depends in part on the support of the host community (Garau-Vadell et al., 2018 ).

Tourism planning involves the dual objectives of optimizing the well-being of local residents in host communities and minimizing the costs of tourism development (Sharpley, 2014 ). Tourism researchers have paid significant attention to examining the social impacts of tourism in general and to understanding host communities’ perceptions of tourism in particular. Studies of the social impacts of tourism development have examined the perceptions of local residents and the effects of tourism on social cohesion, traditional lifestyles, and the erosion of cultural heritage, particularly among Indigenous Peoples (Butler & Hinch, 2007 ; Deery et al., 2012 ; Mathieson & Wall, 1982 ; Sharpley, 2014 ; Whitford & Ruhanen, 2016 ).

Alternative Tourism and Sustainable Development

A wide body of published research is related to the role of tourism in sustainable development, and much of the literature involves case studies of particular types of tourism. Many such studies contrast types of alternative tourism with those of mass tourism, which has received sustained criticism for decades and is widely considered to be unsustainable (Cater, 1993 ; Conway & Timms, 2010 ; Fennell, 2020 ; Gursoy et al., 2010 ; Liu, 2003 ; Peeters, 2012 ; Zapata et al., 2011 ). Still, some tourism researchers have taken issue with the conclusion that mass tourism is inherently unsustainable (Sharpley, 2000 ; Weaver, 2007 ), and some have argued for developing pathways to “sustainable mass tourism” as “the desired and impending outcome for most destinations” (Weaver, 2012 , p. 1030). In integrating an ethical component to mass tourism development, Weaver ( 2014 , p. 131) suggests that the desirable outcome is “enlightened mass tourism.” Such suggestions have been contested in the literature and criticized for dubious assumptions about emergent norms of sustainability and support for growth, which are widely seen as contradictory (Peeters, 2012 ; Wheeller, 2007 ).

Models of responsible or alternative tourism development include ecotourism, community-based tourism, pro-poor tourism, slow tourism, green tourism, and heritage tourism, among others. Most models of alternative tourism development emphasize themes that aim to counteract the perceived negative impacts of conventional or mass tourism. As such, the objectives of these models of tourism development tend to focus on minimizing environmental impacts, supporting biodiversity conservation, empowering local communities, alleviating poverty, and engendering pleasant relationships between tourists and residents.

Approaches to alternative tourism development tend to overlap with themes of responsible tourism, and the two terms are frequently used interchangeably. Responsible tourism has been characterized in terms of numerous elements, including

ensuring that communities are involved in and benefit from tourism;

respecting local, natural, and cultural environments;

involving the local community in planning and decision-making;

using local resources sustainably;

behaving in ways that are sensitive to the host culture;

maintaining and encouraging natural, economic, and cultural diversity; and

assessing environmental, social, and economic impacts as a prerequisite to tourism development (Spenceley, 2012 ).

Hetzer ( 1965 ) identified four fundamental principles or perquisites for a more responsible form of tourism: (a) minimum environmental impact; (b) minimum impact on and maximum respect for host cultures; (c) maximum economic benefits to the host country; and (d) maximum leisure satisfaction to participating tourists.

The history of ecotourism is closely connected with the emergence of sustainable development, as it was born out of a concern for the conservation of biodiversity. Ecotourism is a form of tourism that aims to minimize local environmental impacts while bringing benefits to protected areas and the people living around those lands (Honey, 2008 ). Ecotourism represents a small segment of nature-based tourism, which is understood as tourism based on the natural attractions of an area, such as scenic areas and wildlife (Gössling, 1999 ). The ecotourism movement gained momentum in the 1990s, primarily in developing countries in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, and nearly all countries are now engaged in some form of ecotourism. In some communities, ecotourism is the primary economic activity and source of income and economic development.

The term “ecotourism” was coined by Hector Ceballos-Lascuráin and defined by him as “tourism that consists in travelling to relatively undisturbed or uncontaminated natural areas with the specific object of studying, admiring, and enjoying the scenery and its wild plants and animals” (Ceballos-Lascuráin, 1987 , p. 13). In discussing ecotourism resources, he also made reference to “any existing cultural manifestations (both past and present) found in these areas” (Ceballos-Lascuráin, 1987 , p. 14). The basic precepts of ecotourism had been discussed long before the actual use of the term. Twenty years earlier, Hetzer ( 1965 ) referred to a form of tourism “based principally upon natural and archaeological resources such as caves, fossil sites (and) archaeological sites.” Thus, both natural resources and cultural resources were integrated into ecotourism frameworks from the earliest manifestations.

Costa Rica is well known for having successfully integrated ecotourism in its overall strategy for sustainable development, and numerous case studies of ecotourism in Costa Rica appear in the literature (Chase et al., 1998 ; Fennell & Eagles, 1990 ; Gray & Campbell, 2007 ; Hearne & Salinas, 2002 ). Ecotourism in Costa Rica has been seen as having supported the economic development of the country while promoting biodiversity conservation in its extensive network of protected areas. Chase et al. ( 1998 ) estimated the demand for ecotourism in a study of differential pricing of entrance fees at national parks in Costa Rica. The authors estimated elasticities associated with the own-price, cross-price, and income variables and found that the elasticities of demand were significantly different between three different national park sites. The results reveal the heterogeneity characterizing tourist behavior and park attractions and amenities. Hearne and Salinas ( 2002 ) used choice experiments to examine the preferences of domestic and foreign tourists in Costa Rica in an ecotourism site. Both sets of tourists demonstrated a preference for improved infrastructure, more information, and lower entrance fees. Foreign tourists demonstrated relatively stronger preferences for the inclusion of restrictions in the access to some trails.

Ecotourism has also been studied extensively in Kenya (Southgate, 2006 ), Malaysia (Lian Chan & Baum, 2007 ), Nepal (Baral et al., 2008 ), Peru (Stronza, 2007 ), and Taiwan (Lai & Nepal, 2006 ), among many other countries. Numerous case studies have demonstrated the potential for ecotourism to contribute to sustainable development by providing support for biodiversity conservation, local livelihoods, and regional development.

Community-Based Tourism

Community-based tourism (CBT) is a model of tourism development that emphasizes the development of local communities and allows for local residents to have substantial control over its development and management, and a major proportion of the benefits remain within the community. CBT emerged during the 1970s as a response to the negative impacts of the international mass tourism development model (Cater, 1993 ; Hall & Lew, 2009 ; Turner & Ash, 1975 ; Zapata et al., 2011 ).

Community-based tourism has been examined for its potential to contribute to poverty reduction. In a study of the viability of the CBT model to support socioeconomic development and poverty alleviation in Nicaragua, tourism was perceived by participants in the study to have an impact on employment creation in their communities (Zapata et al., 2011 ). Tourism was seen to have had positive impacts on strengthening local knowledge and skills, particularly on the integration of women to new roles in the labor market. One of the main perceived gains regarding the environment was the process of raising awareness regarding the conservation of natural resources. The small scale of CBT operations and low capacity to accommodate visitors was seen as a limitation of the model.

Spenceley ( 2012 ) compiled case studies of community-based tourism in countries in southern Africa, including Botswana, Madagascar, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. In this volume, authors characterize community-based and nature-based tourism development projects in the region and demonstrate how community participation in planning and decision-making has generated benefits for local residents and supported conservation initiatives. They contend that responsible tourism practices are of particular importance in the region because of the rich biological diversity, abundant charismatic wildlife, and the critical need for local economic development and livelihood strategies.

In Kenya, CBT enterprises were not perceived to have made a significant impact on poverty reduction at an individual household level, in part because the model relied heavily on donor funding, reinforcing dependency and poverty (Manyara & Jones, 2007 ). The study identified several critical success factors for CBT enterprises, namely, awareness and sensitization, community empowerment, effective leadership, and community capacity building, which can inform appropriate tourism policy formulation in Kenya. The impacts of CBT on economic development and poverty reduction would be greatly enhanced if tourism initiatives were able to emphasize independence, address local community priorities, enhance community empowerment and transparency, discourage elitism, promote effective community leadership, and develop community capacity to operate their own enterprises more efficiently.

Pro-Poor Tourism

Pro-poor tourism is a model of tourism development that brings net benefits to people living in poverty (Ashley et al., 2001 ; Harrison, 2008 ). Although its theoretical foundations and development objectives overlap to some degree with those of community-based tourism and other models of AT, the key distinctive feature of pro-poor tourism is that it places poor people and poverty at the top of the agenda. By focusing on a very simple and incontrovertibly moral idea, namely, the net benefits of tourism to impoverished people, the concept has broad appeal to donors and international aid agencies. Harnessing the economic benefits of tourism for pro-poor growth means capitalizing on the advantages while reducing negative impacts to people living in poverty (Ashley et al., 2001 ). Pro-poor approaches to tourism development include increasing access of impoverished people to economic benefits; addressing negative social and environmental impacts associated with tourism; and focusing on policies, processes, and partnerships that seek to remove barriers to participation by people living in poverty. At the local level, pro-poor tourism can play a very significant role in livelihood security and poverty reduction (Ashley & Roe, 2002 ).

Rogerson ( 2011 ) argues that the growth of pro-poor tourism initiatives in South Africa suggests that the country has become a laboratory for the testing and evolution of new approaches toward sustainable development planning that potentially will have relevance for other countries in the developing world. A study of pro-poor tourism development initiatives in Laos identified a number of favorable conditions for pro-poor tourism development, including the fact that local people are open to tourism and motivated to participate (Suntikul et al., 2009 ). The authors also noted a lack of development in the linkages that could optimize the fulfilment of the pro-poor agenda, such as training or facilitation of local people’s participation in pro-poor tourism development at the grassroots level.

Critics of the model have argued that pro-poor tourism is based on an acceptance of the status quo of existing capitalism, that it is morally indiscriminate and theoretically imprecise, and that its practitioners are academically and commercially marginal (Harrison, 2008 ). As Chok et al. ( 2007 ) indicate, the focus “on poor people in the South reflects a strong anthropocentric view . . . and . . . environmental benefits are secondary to poor peoples’” benefits (p. 153).

Harrison ( 2008 ) argues that pro-poor tourism is not a distinctive approach to tourism as a development tool and that it may be easier to discuss what pro-poor tourism is not than what it is. He concludes that it is neither anticapitalist nor inconsistent with mainstream tourism on which it relies; it is neither a theory nor a model and is not a niche form of tourism. Further, he argues that it has no distinctive method and is not only about people living in poverty.

Slow Tourism

The concept of slow tourism has emerged as a model of sustainable tourism development, and as such, it lacks an exact definition. The concept of slow tourism traces its origin back to some institutionalized social movements such as “slow food” and “slow cities” that began in Italy in the 1990s and spread rapidly around the world (Fullagar et al., 2012 ; Oh et al., 2016 , p. 205). Advocates of slow tourism tend to emphasize slowness in terms of speed, mobility, and modes of transportation that generate less environmental pollution. They propose niche marketing for alternative forms of tourism that focus on quality upgrading rather than merely increasing the quantity of visitors via the established mass-tourism infrastructure (Conway & Timms, 2010 ).

In the context of the Caribbean region, slow tourism has been promoted as more culturally sensitive and authentic, as compared to the dominant mass tourism development model that is based on all-inclusive beach resorts dependent on foreign investment (Conway & Timms, 2010 ). Recognizing its value as an alternative marketing strategy, Conway and Timms ( 2010 ) make the case for rebranding alternative tourism in the Caribbean as a means of revitalizing the sector for the changing demands of tourists in the 21st century . They suggest that slow tourism is the antithesis of mass tourism, which “relies on increasing the quantity of tourists who move through the system with little regard to either the quality of the tourists’ experience or the benefits that accrue to the localities the tourist visits” (Conway & Timms, 2010 , p. 332). The authors draw on cases from Barbados, the Grenadines, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago to characterize models of slow tourism development in remote fishing villages and communities near nature preserves and sea turtle nesting sites.

Although there is a growing interest in the concept of slow tourism in the literature, there seems to be little agreement about the exact nature of slow tourism and whether it is a niche form of special interest tourism or whether it represents a more fundamental potential shift across the industry. Conway and Timms ( 2010 ) focus on the destination, advocating for slow tourism in terms of a promotional identity for an industry in need of rebranding. Caffyn ( 2012 , p. 77) discusses the implementation of slow tourism in terms of “encouraging visitors to make slower choices when planning and enjoying their holidays.” It is not clear whether slow tourism is a marketing strategy, a mindset, or a social movement, but the literature on slow tourism nearly always equates the term with sustainable tourism (Caffyn, 2012 ; Conway & Timms, 2010 ; Oh et al., 2016 ). Caffyn ( 2012 , p. 80) suggests that slow tourism could offer a “win–win,” which she describes as “a more sustainable form of tourism; keeping more of the economic benefits within the local community and destination; and delivering a more meaningful and satisfying experience.” Research on slow tourism is nascent, and thus the contribution of slow tourism to sustainable development is not well understood.

Impacts of Tourism Development

The role of tourism in sustainable development can be examined through an understanding of the economic, environmental, and social impacts of tourism. Tourism is a global phenomenon that involves travel, recreation, the consumption of food, overnight accommodations, entertainment, sightseeing, and other activities that simultaneously intersect the lives of local residents, businesses, and communities. The impacts of tourism involve benefits and costs to all groups, and some of these impacts cannot easily be measured. Nevertheless, they have been studied extensively in the literature, which provides some context for how these benefits and costs are distributed.

Economic Impacts of Tourism

The travel and tourism sector is one of the largest components of the global economy, and global tourism has increased exponentially since the end of the Second World War (UNWTO, 2020 ). The direct, indirect, and induced economic impact of global travel accounted for 8.9 trillion U.S. dollars in contribution to the global gross domestic product (GDP), or 10.3% of global GDP. The global travel and tourism sector supports approximately 330 million jobs, or 1 in 10 jobs around the world. From an economic perspective, tourism plays a significant role in sustainable development. In many developing countries, tourism has the potential to play a unique role in income generation and distribution relative to many other industries, in part because of its high multiplier effect and consumption of local goods and services. However, research on the economic impacts of tourism has shown that this potential has rarely been fully realized (Liu, 2003 ).

Numerous studies have examined the impact of tourism expenditure on GDP, income, employment, and public sector revenue. Narayan ( 2004 ) used a computable general equilibrium model to estimate the economic impact of tourism growth on the economy of Fiji. Tourism is Fiji’s largest industry, with average annual growth of 10–12%; and as a middle-income country, tourism is critical to Fiji’s economic development. The findings indicate that an increase in tourism expenditures was associated with an increase in GDP, an improvement in the country’s balance of payments, and an increase in real consumption and national welfare. Evidence suggests that the benefits of tourism expansion outweigh any export effects caused by an appreciation of the exchange rate and an increase in domestic prices and wages.

Seetanah ( 2011 ) examined the potential contribution of tourism to economic growth and development using panel data of 19 island economies around the world from 1990 to 2007 and revealed that tourism development is an important factor in explaining economic performance in the selected island economies. The results have policy implications for improving economic growth by harnessing the contribution of the tourism sector. Pratt ( 2015 ) modeled the economic impact of tourism for seven small island developing states in the Pacific, the Caribbean, and the Indian Ocean. In most states, the transportation sector was found to have above-average linkages to other sectors of the economy. The results revealed some advantages of economies of scale for maximizing the economic contribution of tourism.

Apergis and Payne ( 2012 ) examined the causal relationship between tourism and economic growth for a panel of nine Caribbean countries. The panel of Caribbean countries includes Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Grenada, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Trinidad and Tobago. The authors use a panel error correction model to reveal bidirectional causality between tourism and economic growth in both the short run and the long run. The presence of bidirectional causality reiterates the importance of the tourism sector in the generation of foreign exchange income and in financing the production of goods and services within these countries. Likewise, stable political institutions and adequate government policies to ensure the appropriate investment in physical and human capital will enhance economic growth. In turn, stable economic growth will provide the resources needed to develop the tourism infrastructure for the success of the countries’ tourism sector. Thus, policy makers should be cognizant of the interdependent relationship between tourism and economic growth in the design and implementation of economic policy. The mixed nature of these results suggest that the relationship between tourism and economic growth depends largely on the social and economic context as well as the role of tourism in the economy.

The economic benefits and costs of tourism are frequently distributed unevenly. An analysis of the impact of wildlife conservation policies in Zambia on household welfare found that households located near national parks earn higher levels of income from wage employment and self-employment than other rural households in the country, but they were also more likely to suffer crop losses related to wildlife conflicts (Richardson et al., 2012 ). The findings suggest that tourism development and wildlife conservation can contribute to pro-poor development, but they may be sustainable only if human–wildlife conflicts are minimized or compensated.

Environmental Impacts of Tourism

The environmental impacts of tourism are significant, ranging from local effects to contributions to global environmental change (Gössling & Peeters, 2015 ). Tourism is both dependent on water resources and a factor in global and local freshwater use. Tourists consume water for drinking, when showering and using the toilet, when participating in activities such as winter ski tourism (i.e., snowmaking), and when using swimming pools and spas. Fresh water is also needed to maintain hotel gardens and golf courses, and water use is embedded in tourism infrastructure development (e.g., accommodations, laundry, dining) and in food and fuel production. Direct water consumption in tourism is estimated to be approximately 350 liters (L) per guest night for accommodation; when indirect water use from food, energy, and transport are considered, total water use in tourism is estimated to be approximately 6,575 L per guest night, or 27,800 L per person per trip (Gössling & Peeters, 2015 ). In addition, tourism contributes to the pollution of oceans as well as lakes, rivers, and other freshwater systems (Gössling, 2002 ; Gössling et al., 2011 ).

The clearing and conversion of land is central for tourism development, and in many cases, the land used for tourism includes roads, airports, railways, accommodations, trails, pedestrian walks, shopping areas, parking areas, campgrounds, vacation homes, golf courses, marinas, ski resorts, and indirect land use for food production, disposal of solid wastes, and the treatment of wastewater (Gössling & Peeters, 2015 ). Global land use for accommodation is estimated to be approximately 42 m 2 per bed. Total global land use for tourism is estimated to be nearly 62,000 km 2 , or 11.7 m 2 per tourist; more than half of this estimate is represented by land use for traffic infrastructure.

Tourism and hospitality have direct and indirect links to nearly all aspects of food production, preparation, and consumption because of the quantities of food consumed in tourism contexts (Gössling et al., 2011 ). Food production has significant implications for sustainable development, given the growing global demand for food. The implications include land conversion, losses to biodiversity, changes in nutrient cycling, and contributions to greenhouse emissions that are associated with global climate change (Vitousek et al., 1997 ). Global food use for tourism is estimated to be approximately 39.4 megatons 1 (Mt), about 38% than the amount of food consumed at home. This equates to approximately 1,800 grams (g) of food consumed per tourist per day.

Although tourism has been promoted as a low-impact, nonextractive option for economic development, (Gössling, 2000 ), assessments reveal that such pursuits have a significant carbon footprint, as tourism is significantly more carbon intensive than other potential areas of economic development (Lenzen et al., 2018 ). Tourism is dependent on energy, and virtually all energy use in the tourism sector is derived from fossil fuels, which contribute to global greenhouse emissions that are associated with global climate change. Energy use for tourism has been estimated to be approximately 3,575 megajoules 2 (MJ) per trip, including energy for travel and accommodations (Gössling & Peeters, 2015 ). A previous estimate of global carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emissions from tourism provided values of 1.12 gigatons 3 (Gt) of CO 2 , amounting to about 3% of global CO 2 -equivalent (CO 2 e) emissions (Gössling & Peeters, 2015 ). However, these analyses do not cover the supply chains underpinning tourism and do not therefore represent true carbon footprints. A more complete analysis of the emissions from energy consumption necessary to sustain the tourism sector would include food and beverages, infrastructure construction and maintenance, retail, and financial services. Between 2009 and 2013 , tourism’s global carbon footprint is estimated to have increased from 3.9 to 4.5 GtCO 2 e, four times more than previously estimated, accounting for about 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions (Lenzen et al., 2018 ). The majority of this footprint is exerted by and within high-income countries. The rising global demand for tourism is outstripping efforts at decarbonization of tourism operations and as a result is accelerating global carbon emissions.

Social Impacts of Tourism

The social impacts of tourism have been widely studied, with an emphasis on residents’ perceptions in the host community (Sharpley, 2014 ). Case studies include research conducted in Australia (Faulkner & Tideswell, 1997 ; Gursoy et al., 2010 ; Tovar & Lockwood, 2008 ), Belize (Diedrich & Garcia-Buades, 2008 ), China (Gu & Ryan, 2008 ), Fiji (King et al., 1993 ), Greece (Haralambopoulos & Pizam, 1996 ; Tsartas, 1992 ), Hungary (Rátz, 2000 ), Thailand (Huttasin, 2008 ), Turkey (Kuvan & Akan, 2005 ), the United Kingdom (Brunt & Courtney, 1999 ; Haley et al., 2005 ), and the United States (Andereck et al., 2005 ; Milman & Pizam, 1988 ), among others. The social impacts of tourism are difficult to measure, and most published studies are mainly concerned with the social impacts on the host communities rather than the impacts on the tourists themselves.

Studies of residents’ perceptions of tourism are typically conducted using household surveys. In most cases, residents recognize the economic dependence on tourism for income, and there is substantial evidence to suggest that working in or owning a business in tourism or a related industry is associated with more positive perceptions of tourism (Andereck et al., 2007 ). The perceived nature of negative effects is complex and often conveys a dislike of crowding, traffic congestion, and higher prices for basic needs (Deery et al., 2012 ). When the number of tourists far exceeds that of the resident population, negative attitudes toward tourism may manifest (Diedrich & Garcia-Buades, 2008 ). However, residents who recognize negative impacts may not necessarily oppose tourism development (King et al., 1993 ).

In some regions, little is known about the social and cultural impacts of tourism despite its dominance as an economic sector. Tourism is a rapidly growing sector in Cuba, and it is projected to grow at rates that exceed the average projected growth rates for the Caribbean and the world overall (Salinas et al., 2018 ). Still, even though there has been rapid tourism development in Cuba, there has been little research related to the environmental and sociocultural impacts of this tourism growth (Rutty & Richardson, 2019 ).

In some international tourism contexts, studies have found that residents are generally resentful toward tourism because it fuels inequality and exacerbates racist attitudes and discrimination (Cabezas, 2004 ; Jamal & Camargo, 2014 ; Mbaiwa, 2005 ). Other studies revealed similar narratives and recorded statements of exclusion and socioeconomic stratification (Sanchez & Adams, 2008 ). Local residents often must navigate the gaps in the racialized, gendered, and sexualized structures imposed by the global tourism industry and host-country governments (Cabezas, 2004 ).

However, during times of economic crisis, residents may develop a more permissive view as their perceptions of the costs of tourism development decrease (Garau-Vadell et al., 2018 ). This increased positive attitude is not based on an increase in the perception of positive impacts of tourism, but rather on a decrease in the perception of the negative impacts.

There is a growing body of research on Indigenous and Aboriginal tourism that emphasizes justice issues such as human rights and self-empowerment, control, and participation of traditional owners in comanagement of destinations (Jamal & Camargo, 2014 ; Ryan & Huyton, 2000 ; Whyte, 2010 ).

Sustainability of Tourism

A process or system is said to be sustainable to the extent that it is robust, resilient, and adaptive (Anderies et al., 2013 ). By most measures, the global tourism system does not meet these criteria for sustainability. Tourism is not robust in that it cannot resist threats and perturbations, such as economic shocks, public health pandemics, war, and other disruptions. Tourism is not resilient in that it does not easily recover from failures, such as natural disasters or civil unrest. Furthermore, tourism is not adaptive in that it is often unable to change in response to external conditions. One example that underscores the failure to meet all three criteria is the dependence of tourism on fossil fuels for transportation and energy, which are key inputs for tourism development. This dependence itself is not sustainable (Wheeller, 2007 ), and thus the sustainability of tourism is questionable.

Liu ( 2003 ) notes that research related to the role of tourism in sustainable development has emphasized supply-side concepts such as sustaining tourism resources and ignored the demand side, which is particularly vulnerable to social and economic shocks. Tourism is vulnerable to both localized and global shocks. Studies of the vulnerability of tourism to localized shocks include disaster vulnerability in coastal Thailand (Calgaro & Lloyd, 2008 ), bushfires in northeast Victoria in Australia (Cioccio & Michael, 2007 ), forest fires in British Columbia, Canada (Hystad & Keller, 2008 ); and outbreak of foot and mouth disease in the United Kingdom (Miller & Ritchie, 2003 ).

Like most other economic sectors, tourism is vulnerable to the impacts of earthquakes, particularly in areas where tourism infrastructure may not be resilient to such shocks. Numerous studies have examined the impacts of earthquake events on tourism, including studies of the aftermath of the 1997 earthquake in central Italy (Mazzocchi & Montini, 2001 ), the 1999 earthquake in Taiwan (Huan et al., 2004 ; Huang & Min, 2002 ), and the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake in western Sichuan, China (Yang et al., 2011 ), among others.

Tourism is vulnerable to extreme weather events. Regional economic strength has been found to be associated with lower vulnerability to natural disasters. Kim and Marcoullier ( 2015 ) examined the vulnerability and resilience of 10 tourism-based regional economies that included U.S. national parks or protected seashores situated on the Gulf of Mexico or Atlantic Ocean coastline that were affected by several hurricanes over a 26-year period. Regions with stronger economic characteristics prior to natural disasters were found to have lower disaster losses than regions with weaker economies.

Tourism is extremely sensitive to oil spills, whatever their origin, and the volume of oil released need not be large to generate significant economic losses (Cirer-Costa, 2015 ). Studies of the vulnerability of tourism to the localized shock of an oil spill include research on the impacts of oil spills in Alaska (Coddington, 2015 ), Brazil (Ribeiro et al., 2020 ), Spain (Castanedo et al., 2009 ), affected regions in the United States along the Gulf of Mexico (Pennington-Gray et al., 2011 ; Ritchie et al., 2013 ), and the Republic of Korea (Cheong, 2012 ), among others. Future research on the vulnerability of tourist destinations to oil spills should also incorporate freshwater environments, such as lakes, rivers, and streams, where the rupture of oil pipelines is more frequent.

Significant attention has been paid to assessing the vulnerability of tourist destinations to acts of terrorism and the impacts of terrorist attacks on regional tourist economies (Liu & Pratt, 2017 ). Such studies include analyses of the impacts of terrorist attacks on three European countries, Greece, Italy, and Austria (Enders et al., 1992 ); the impact of the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States (Goodrich, 2002 ); terrorism and tourism in Nepal (Bhattarai et al., 2005 ); vulnerability of tourism livelihoods in Bali (Baker & Coulter, 2007 ); the impact of terrorism on tourist preferences for destinations in the Mediterranean and the Canary Islands (Arana & León, 2008 ); the 2011 massacres in Olso and Utøya, Norway (Wolff & Larsen, 2014 ); terrorism and political violence in Tunisia (Lanouar & Goaied, 2019 ); and the impact of terrorism on European tourism (Corbet et al., 2019 ), among others. Pizam and Fleischer ( 2002 ) studied the impact of acts of terrorism on tourism demand in Israel between May 1991 and May 2001 , and they confirmed that the frequency of acts of terrorism had caused a larger decline in international tourist arrivals than the severity of these acts. Most of these are ex post studies, and future assessments of the underlying conditions of destinations could reveal a deeper understanding of the vulnerability of tourism to terrorism.

Tourism is vulnerable to economic crisis, both local economic shocks (Okumus & Karamustafa, 2005 ; Stylidis & Terzidou, 2014 ) and global economic crisis (Papatheodorou et al., 2010 ; Smeral, 2010 ). Okumus and Karamustafa ( 2005 ) evaluated the impact of the February 2001 economic crisis in Turkey on tourism, and they found that the tourism industry was poorly prepared for the economic crisis despite having suffered previous impacts related to the Gulf War in the early 1990s, terrorism in Turkey in the 1990s, the civil war in former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, an internal economic crisis in 1994 , and two earthquakes in the northwest region of Turkey in 1999 . In a study of the attitudes and perceptions of citizens of Greece, Stylidis and Terzidou ( 2014 ) found that economic crisis is associated with increased support for tourism development, particularly out of self-interest. Economic crisis diminishes residents’ concern for environmental issues. In a study of the behavior of European tourists amid an economic crisis, Eugenio-Martin and Campos-Soria ( 2014 ) found that the probability of households cutting back on travel expenditures depends largely on the climate and economic conditions of tourists’ home countries, and households that do reduce travel spending engage in tourism closer to home.

Becken and Lennox ( 2012 ) studied the implications of a long-term increase in oil prices for tourism in New Zealand, and they estimate that a doubling of oil prices is associated with a 1.7% decrease in real gross national disposable income and a 9% reduction in the real value of tourism exports. Chatziantoniou et al. ( 2013 ) investigated the relationship among oil price shocks, tourism variables, and economic indicators in four European Mediterranean countries and found that aggregate demand oil price shocks generated a lagged effect on tourism-generated income and economic growth. Kisswani et al. ( 2020 ) examined the asymmetric effect of oil prices on tourism receipts and the sensitive susceptibility of tourism to oil price changes using nonlinear analysis. The findings document a long-run asymmetrical effect for most countries, after incorporating the structural breaks, suggesting that governments and tourism businesses and organizations should interpret oil price fluctuations cautiously.

Finally, the sustainability of tourism has been shown to be vulnerable to the outbreak of infectious diseases, including the impact of the Ebola virus on tourism in sub-Saharan Africa (Maphanga & Henama, 2019 ; Novelli et al., 2018 ) and in the United States (Cahyanto et al., 2016 ). The literature also includes studies of the impact of swine flu on tourism demand in Brunei (Haque & Haque, 2018 ), Mexico (Monterrubio, 2010 ), and the United Kingdom (Page et al., 2012 ), among others. In addition, rapid assessments of the impacts of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 have documented severe disruptions and cessations of tourism because of unprecedented global travel restrictions and widespread restrictions on public gatherings (Gössling et al., 2020 ; Qiu et al., 2020 ; Sharma & Nicolau, 2020 ). Hotels, airlines, cruise lines, and car rentals have all experienced a significant decrease globally because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the shock to the industry is significant enough to warrant concerns about the long-term outlook (Sharma & Nicolau, 2020 ). Qiu et al. ( 2020 ) estimated the social costs of the pandemic to tourism in three cities in China (Hong Kong, Guangzhou, and Wuhan), and they found that most respondents were willing to pay for risk reduction and action in responding to the pandemic crisis; there was no significant difference between residents’ willingness to pay in the three cities. Some research has emphasized how lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic can prepare global tourism for an economic transformation that is needed to mitigate the impacts of climate change (Brouder, 2020 ; Prideaux et al., 2020 ).

It is clear that tourism has contributed significantly to economic development globally, but its role in sustainable development is uncertain, contested, and potentially paradoxical. This is due, in part, to the contested nature of sustainable development itself. Tourism has been promoted as a low-impact, nonextractive option for economic development, particularly for developing countries (Gössling, 2000 ), and many countries have managed to increase their participation in the global economy through development of international tourism. Tourism development has been viewed as an important sector for investment to enhance economic growth, poverty alleviation, and food security, and the sector provides an alternative opportunity to large-scale development projects and extractive industries that contribute to emissions of pollutants and threaten biodiversity and cultural values. However, global evidence from research on the economic impacts of tourism has shown that this potential has rarely been realized (Liu, 2003 ).

The role of tourism in sustainable development has been studied extensively and with a variety of perspectives, including the conceptualization of alternative or responsible forms of tourism and the examination of economic, environmental, and social impacts of tourism development. The research has generally concluded that tourism development has contributed to sustainable development in some cases where it is demonstrated to have provided support for biodiversity conservation initiatives and livelihood development strategies. As an economic sector, tourism is considered to be labor intensive, providing opportunities for poor households to enhance their livelihood through the sale of goods and services to foreign tourists.

Nature-based tourism approaches such as ecotourism and community-based tourism have been successful at attracting tourists to parks and protected areas, and their spending provides financial support for biodiversity conservation, livelihoods, and economic growth in developing countries. Nevertheless, studies of the impacts of tourism development have documented negative environmental impacts locally in terms of land use, food and water consumption, and congestion, and globally in terms of the contribution of tourism to climate change through the emission of greenhouse gases related to transportation and other tourist activities. Studies of the social impacts of tourism have documented experiences of discrimination based on ethnicity, gender, race, sex, and national identity.

The sustainability of tourism as an economic sector has been examined in terms of its vulnerability to civil conflict, economic shocks, natural disasters, and public health pandemics. Most studies conclude that tourism may have positive impacts for regional development and environmental conservation, but there is evidence that tourism inherently generates negative environmental impacts, primarily through pollutions stemming from transportation. The regional benefits of tourism development must be considered alongside the global impacts of increased transportation and tourism participation. Global tourism has also been shown to be vulnerable to economic crises, oil price shocks, and global outbreaks of infectious diseases. Given that tourism is dependent on energy, the movement of people, and the consumption of resources, virtually all tourism activities have significant economic, environmental, and sustainable impacts. As such, the role of tourism in sustainable development is highly questionable. Future research on the role of tourism in sustainable development should focus on reducing the negative impacts of tourism development, both regionally and globally.

Crisis in our national parks: how tourists are loving nature to death

As thrill seekers and Instagrammers swarm public lands, reporting from eight sites across America shows the scale of the threat

J ust before sunset near Page, Arizona, a parade of humanity marched up the sandy, half-mile trail toward Horseshoe Bend. They had come from all over the world. Some carried boxes of McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets, others cradled chihuahuas and a few men hid engagement rings in their pockets. But just about everyone had one thing at the ready: a cellphone to snap a picture.

Horseshoe Bend is one of the American west’s most celebrated overlooks. From a sheer sandstone precipice just a few miles outside Grand Canyon national park, visitors get a bird’s-eye view of the emerald Colorado river as it makes a U-turn 800ft below. Hundreds of miles from any large city, and nestled in the heart of south-west canyon country, Horseshoe Bend was once as lonely as it was beautiful.

“It was just a local place for family outings,” recalls Bill Diak, 73, who has lived in Page for 38 years and served three terms as its mayor. “But with the invention of the cellphone, things changed overnight.”

Horseshoe Bend is what happens when a patch of public land becomes #instagramfamous. Over the past decade photos have spread like wildfire on social media, catching the 7,000 residents of Page and local land managers off guard.

According to Diak, visitation grew from a few thousand annual visitors historically to 100,000 in 2010 – the year Instagram was launched. By 2015, an estimated 750,000 people made the pilgrimage. This year visitation is expected to reach 2 million.

Tourist at the Horseshoe Bend overlook during sunset.

Numbers used to peak in the summer but tourists now stream in all year round – nearly 5,000 a day. And fame has come with a dark side. In May 2018, a Phoenix man fell to his death when he slipped off the cliff edge. In 2010, a Greek tourist died when a rock underneath him gave way, police said, as he took photos. Like the recent death of a couple taking photographs in Yosemite , the incidents have raised troubling questions about what happens when nature goes viral.

“Social media is the number one driver,” said Maschelle Zia, who manages Horseshoe Bend for the Glen Canyon national recreation area. “People don’t come here for solitude. They are looking for the iconic photo.”

‘Our species is having the greatest impact’

Across America, national parks and public lands are facing a crisis of popularity. Technology, successful marketing, and international tourism have brought a surge in visitation unlike anything seen before. In 2016 and 2017, the national parks saw an unprecedented 330.9 million visitors, the highest ever recorded . That’s not far off the US population itself.

Backcountry trails are clogging up, mountain roads are thickening with traffic, picturesque vistas are morphing into selfie-taking scrums. And in the process, what is most loved about them risks being lost.

“The least-studied mammal in Yellowstone is the most abundant: humans,” says Dan Wenk, the former superintendent of one the most chronically overcrowded parks in the system. In Yellowstone, America’s oldest national park, visitation has surged 40% since 2008, topping 4 million in 2017.

After 43 years in the park service, Wenk is worried. “Our own species is having the greatest impact on the park and the quality of the experience is becoming a casualty.”

Over a period of four months, from high summer to late autumn, the Guardian dispatched writers across the American west to examine how overcrowding is playing out at ground level. We found a brewing crisis: two mile-long “bison jams” in Yellowstone, fist-fights in parking lots at Glacier, a small Colorado town overrun by millions of visitors.

Moreover, we found people wrestling with an existential question: what should a national park be in the modern age? Can parks embrace an unlimited number of visitors while retaining what made them, as the writer Wallace Stegner once put it, “ the best idea we ever had ”?

People, people everywhere

In 1872, Yellowstone became the first national park in the world. In 1904, the first year for which visitation figures are available, 120,690 people visited the national parks, which by then included Mt Rainier, Sequoia and Yosemite. By the mid-century that number swelled to tens of millions, as more parks were added to the system and destination road trips became synonymous with American vacations.

But today the pace of visitation has outstripped resources. Much of the National Park Service’s infrastructure dates back to the Mission 66, a $1bn initiative undertaken in the 1950s and 60s, and wasn’t built with modern crowds in mind.

Environmental challenges are burgeoning – recent research has found national parks bear the disproportionate brunt of global warming – and years of wear and tear have seen park maintenance fall woefully behind. The current backlog of necessary upgrades to roads, trails and buildings stands at more than $11bn. Ryan Zinke’s attempt to sharply increase entry fees at the busiest parks to pay for repairs proved so unpopular it had to be walked back in April.

Traffic congestion has become one of the most visible consequences of overcrowding and underfunding, with some locations seeing tens of thousands of cars a day during peak months.

In Yosemite, despite a shuttle system, the park warns summer visitors to expect two- to three-hour delays entering Yosemite Valley. In Yellowstone, epic bottlenecks are frequent. Famed for its grizzly bears, gray wolves and bison herds, the park is arguably “wilder” than it was 50 years ago, thanks to conservation work. But this rewilding has meant animal sightings routinely cause gridlock along its two-lane roads.

On a recent August day in Hayden Valley, a “bison jam” stretched nearly two miles long. As the herd moved steadily across the road, a scene of frantic commotion began to unfold. Travelers excitedly scrambled from their vehicles. Bison passed within inches, even brushing up against the cars. Some tourists temporarily abandoned their vehicles in the hope of getting close enough for a photo.

Impatient motorists tooted their horns as park rangers tried to bring order. “My job is to manage people, not animals, and I try not to get upset,” said one in uniform. “Most visitors just don’t know how to behave in a wild place.”

A Bison jam near Madison Junction in Yellowstone.

But the bison weren’t the only drama. In the Lamar Valley, a pack of wolves just visible in the distance drew a swarm of vehicles into a turnout. People poured out, leaving their cars parked cattywampus, blocking traffic in both directions.

Sometimes travelers get more of a souvenir than they bargained for. This summer has seen a handful of visitors gored or kicked by bison and elk when they ventured too close. Meanwhile, a video of a man taunting a bison went viral, and citations have been issued to troublemakers who illegally flew drones and tossed rocks and debris into Yellowstone’s sensitive geothermal features, which risks destroying them forever.

Wenk admits rangers feel overwhelmed. “We’re exceeding the carrying capacity and because of it damage is being caused to park resources,” he says. There’s been a 90% increase in vehicle accidents, a 60% bump in calls for ambulance services and a 130% rise in searches and rescues, according to the park. And while visitation has swelled, staffing, because of budget limitations, has remained the same.

A crowded boardwalk in the Lower Geyser Basin in Yellowstone.

Traffic woes aren’t confined to park roads. At Glacier national park in Montana (annual visitation: 3.3 million), parking lots, too, have seen tense standoffs.

The Logan Pass Visitor Center dates back to the Mission 66 era. Perched at the top of Going-to-the-Sun Road, a precarious mountain artery which makes an appearance in the opening scene of The Shining, the center offers access to two of Glacier’s most popular trails – and just 231 parking spots.

“It’s a tough situation,” said Gary Cassier, a visitor from Kalispell, Montana, whose wife was still circling in their car, one of many seeking a spot. Looking out over the alpine meadows and near-vertical slopes, he observed: “Nobody wants to see a multilevel parking garage here.”

Sometimes the battle for a spot turns physical.

“We get fistfights in the parking lot,” says Emlon Stanton, a visitor service assistant. Some visitors even try to claim a spot for their groups on foot. “People get out of their vehicle, jump into a space and stand there,” explains Stanton. “Then somebody tries to pull in and bumps ’em.”

Hikers stand in the full parking lot at Logan Pass in Glacier National Park.

Stanton and other park workers try to prevent such episodes by imposing “soft closures” on the lot – placing traffic cones across its entrance and telling visitors to find parking at the next pullout, three miles away, and take a shuttle back. These closures can happen three to five times a day.

“From a staff perspective, it’s hard,” says park spokeswoman Lauren Alley. “‘Service’ is in our name, and to tell people, over and over, all day long, ‘We’re full, you’ll have to wait’… it’s a real challenge.”

The bathroom at McConnel River Access point in the Gallatin National Forest sits among sagebrush along the Yellowstone River.

A stinking problem

It’s late summer on the Yellowstone river , just north of Gardiner, Montana. A group of anglers stand around their boat trailer, sipping beers and rigging fly rods in the late-morning sun as they wait their turn to launch into the water.

This gravel boat ramp sees a lot of action. But not far off, something stinks. It’s something everybody uses, and something that’s been a headache for forest officials lately: a toilet.

Dealing with human waste has become a herculean undertaking for parks, one that is often hidden from view. In Zion, two outhouses near Angel’s Landing that were described by one writer as reminiscent of “an open sewer” have to be emptied by helicopter at a cost of $20,000 annually. In Colorado, Rocky Mountain national park churns through more than 1,800 miles of toilet paper a year . Yellowstone spent $28,000 on hand sanitizer last summer alone, according to a park official.

As waste mounts, finding someone to take care of it becomes more difficult. The Custer Gallatin national forest, which stretches from the town of West Yellowstone, Montana, to South Dakota, exemplifies this conundrum.

There are more than 200 vault toilets across the Custer Gallatin, small rooms with a single pot over a large septic tank. Signs on the doors remind users not to throw trash in them because it makes vault pumping extremely difficult.

In such remote places, the cost of servicing toilets has soared. In 2013, forest officials budgeted roughly $32,000 for toilet pumping across the Custer and Gallatin national forests (the two forests combined in 2014). So far in 2018, it has cost nearly $80,000. And that’s only the pumping in “priority locations”, explains Lauren Oswald, the recreation program manager for the Custer Gallatin.

Beyond the hefty price tag, the logistics of finding a private contractor to do the job have also become more fraught, especially as towns like Bozeman grow and construction sites hire away the possible candidates. The toilet at the boat ramp is serviced by a company based in Hardin, Montana – more than 200 miles away.

Nearby Yellowstone has waste worries, too. Bethany Gassman, a park spokeswoman, says park staff pumped 248,889 gallons from its 153 vault toilets and other septic systems in 2017, a 19% increase over 2016. Visitors also run through an average of 1,710 toilet paper rolls a day.

A forest service trail crew heads into the Lee Metcalf Wilderness Area in Montana.

The problem of managing human waste extends to the backcountry – areas far from roads and development and accessible only by trails. Forest staff have seen an increase in improperly managed excrement – unburied poop – in popular wilderness areas and unofficial campsites. The problem, Oswald says, is that some people don’t seem to care how they leave the landscape once they’re done with it.

Forest staffers are often faced with the unenviable task of dealing with what slob campers leave behind. It’s the kind of work that sanitation workers are hired for in major cities, not what you’d expect among the wooded peaks and meadowed valleys of Montana.

“They pick up all garbage, whether it’s toilet paper or diapers or beer bottles,” Oswald says of the cleanup missions. “And generally if they come upon human waste, they try to deal with it by burying it at an appropriate depth.”

Nature through a screen

Once parks were the ultimate place to disconnect from the modern world. But today visitors have fresh expectations – and in accommodating these new demands, some say parks are unwittingly driving the very behavior that’s spoiling them.

On Yosemite’s expansive mountainsides, one redwood stands out among the rest. It’s a little bit taller, a little bit too uniform. A metallic shimmer glints in the sun from beneath its branches, colored green and brown to match its neighbors. But this camouflage masks its true role: coating the wilderness in wifi.

This tree is helping to usher in a new era in Yosemite. And it’s not alone . Grand Tetons, Mt Rainier, Yellowstone, and Zion are all being wired with internet and cell service as part of a plan to attract a new generation of park-goers. In Yosemite there are six towers already constructed, with plans under way for close to a dozen more.

The rapid modernization of Yosemite (annual visitation 4.3 million) is evident at Base Camp Eatery, one of the park’s newest food spots. Here, touch screens enable hungry hikers to order drinks and snacks and access instant information about park activities. There’s even a newly opened – and particularly controversial – branch of Starbucks .

Inside Basecamp Eatery at Yosemite, which has new hi-tech touch screens.

“The ways people find out about – and visit – parks is changing,” Lena McDowall, the national park service deputy director, told the Senate subcommittee on national parks last year. Many see meeting the needs of millennials as critical to keeping parks politically relevant amid funding challenges and the uncertainty of climate change.

But the move may come at a cost. “Why come to a national park as opposed to Disneyland? Because you get to confront natural wonders,” says Jeff Ruch, the executive director of Peer, an environmental advocacy organization that has spent years opposing National Park Service plans for expanding cell tower construction. “But if you interpose electronic devices in our view, you miss that.”

Capturing the perfect picture at Horseshoe Bend.

Technological transformation is having unexpected consequences on the landscapes that surround national parks, too. In Utah, visitors are arriving in remarkable numbers to admire its photogenic landscapes – turning Zion, Bryce Canyon and Arches into some of the busiest in the country.

But the increasing squeeze has pushed many to seek thrills elsewhere. Take Kanarraville Falls, just an hour outside southern Zion. Here visitors traverse a narrow, twisting canyon carved through pink-purple sandstone along a series of makeshift ladders, finally arriving at a beautiful waterfall: a taste of Zion’s magical slot canyons but without the crowds. Or at least it used to be.

Social media has been blamed for ruining Kanarraville Falls , once a hidden gem but now featured in countless Instagram posts . Bottlenecks can back up for an hour or more at the ladders, rescue teams are dispatched regularly to retrieve injured hikers, and stream banks are eroding and littered with trash.

On the way Kanarraville Falls hikers climb a series of ladders, but major bottlenecks can form.

For the nearby town of Kanarraville (population 378), the situation has become untenable. Visitors, who routinely double the town’s population, are tramping through a watershed the town taps for drinking water. “The environment can’t handle that many people walking in and out of there,” says Tyler Allred, a town council member. “It needs a chance to recover.”

Kanarraville leaders are doing what they can: the town now charges a $9-per-head fee for hikers, thanks to an arrangement with the state and federal officials.

It’s an experiment that could be replicated elsewhere. But so far the fee hasn’t done much to slow daily traffic, according to Allred. Annual visitation last year was estimated at between 40,000 and 60,000. The next step may be to impose a daily limit on visitors.

Cars sit in traffic in Estes Park, Colorado.

The trouble for towns

Kanarraville is not the only town where tourism is taking a toll. Moab , outside Arches, has become a byword for congestion. In California, locals bemoan the Airbnb-ification of Joshua Tree – an artsy, isolated desert community now overrun by out-of-towners fond of drones and late-night parties .

In Estes Park, just outside the entrance to Rocky Mountain national park, the problems have become especially acute. It’s only 90 minutes from the fast-growing city of Denver, and urbanites flock here in droves for the alpine tundra and soaring, snow-capped mountains.

In the summer months, Estes balloons from its winter population of about 7,000 to a barely contained mass of as many as 3 million people who stream through downtown in search of themed T-shirts, Native American trinkets, and a brew pub libation.

The popular town is overrun with tourists in the summer who come to visit and explore close nearby Rocky Mountain national park.

For 82-year-old Paula Steige, the crush is almost unbearable. Traffic makes getting around downtown a logistical ordeal and solutions offered by the town – including free shuttle buses – offer only minor relief.

“Oftentimes it seems we are in crisis mode, just trying to figure out how to get around. It’s especially bad for people trying to get to and from the park,” Steige said. “And there just doesn’t seem to be a solution to all the overcrowding.”

‘Often times it’s seems we are in crisis mode,’ says a local resident of the crowds.

Steige can’t join those longtime residents who escape to other locales during the summer because she owns and operates the Macdonald Book Shop, started by her grandparents in 1908. She also knows that, like other shop owners, she owes her livelihood to the nearby national park.

“The park is, of course, the reason the whole town thrives,” she said. “The park is the reason the town does well or it goes badly.”

Estes Park, too, has a famous link to The Shining: it’s home to the Stanley hotel, the remote establishment that inspired the horror classic. Stephen King spent a night here in 1974. The Stanley now pulls in nearly 400,000 annual visitors, from ghost hunters attending tours and seances to horror fans hoping to stay in King’s room. The overcrowding galled one recent Stanley visitor. “We went for a seance but so many tourists were crowding around, we couldn’t hear anything,” said the man, who was visiting from Minnesota.

An overlook is along Trail Ridge Road, the stretch of highway that traverses Rocky Mountain National Park from Estes Park.

Police activity in Estes Park is ticking up, too. Police say calls earlier this year jumped nearly 23% over the same period in 2017. The park has also seen a dramatic rise in drug citations and arrests, fueled mostly by a misunderstanding of Colorado’s drug laws, park rangers say. Pot is legal in Colorado and therefore the town of Estes Park, but not at the national park itself, which is on federal property and where the state’s pot laws don’t apply.

“We see a lot more flagrant violations of pot use as well as driving under the influence by people who don’t know or don’t care about the law,” says Kyle Patterson, a park spokeswoman. “I think all of that comes from the fact we are rapidly transforming into an urban park.”

Can anything be done?

While Wallace Stegner’s notion that parks are “America’s best idea” has become synonymous with the nation’s love for them, there’s a little more to his famous 1983 line. The Pulitzer prize winner went on to describe the parks as a mirror for America’s national character: “They reflect us at our best rather than our worst.”

Considering the problems besetting them, his sentiment now seems open to question.

Back in Yellowstone, resource experts say the park is racing headlong toward a reality some might considered sacrilege: limits on people. One top park service official, who did not want to be identified, said daily limits on traffic entering Yellowstone, which could be achieved through a reservation system, was long overdue.

On the foggy coast of northern California, one spot has already taken the plunge. Muir Woods – named for John Muir, a renowned conservationist and one of the earliest advocates for national parks – is home to ancient groves of towering redwoods. The forest is tiny by park standards – just 560 acres – yet more than a million come each year to experience its majestic calm.

Hundreds of parked cars once choked the narrow road leading toward the entrance, threatening the local watershed and wildlife, causing headaches for nearby residents, and creating dangerous situations for drivers and pedestrians walking on the roadside.

Brandon Martin of Ace Parking checks reservations as part of the new system.

That’s why, at the beginning of this year, it became the first to introduce a new parking reservation system that requires all visitors to purchase their spots before arriving. Street parking has been banned – and the number of parking spots has been reduced by roughly 70%.

While officials say it’s too early to tell, estimates show that the reservation system will reduce annual numbers by about 200,000. Park representatives say they hope it will curb crowding by helping people plan their trips for less busy time slots. So far, it seems to be working.

On a drizzling midweek afternoon, nearing the end of summer, both Muir Woods parking lots were full. Near the entrance, the giggle and chatter of excited children mingled with the sounds of waterfalls and bird calls. Stroller wheels thudded rhythmically along the planked wooden boardwalk, echoing through the grove. But a few paces deeper the throngs thinned, and visitors could find a semblance of solitude among the ancient trees.

“Even with a lot of people here there are little pockets of silence you can find,” said Meghan Grady, who lives in nearby San Francisco. “We sat and shut our eyes for a little bit just to listen.”

A child plays in Muir Woods. The park has implemented a parking reservation system to ease crowding.

It is experiences like these that park officials hope to protect. If they are successful, others may follow suit. Parks including Zion, Arches and Acadia are all urgently considering reservation-only systems.

But as officials weigh up large-scale changes, which can take years to research and implement, others point to behavior changes that can be made right now. For instance, a growing cohort of photographers , social media influencers and conservationists is pushing back on geotagging – using GPS to share the precise location in which a photo was taken. Leave No Trace, a nationwide organization promoting outdoor ethics, is helping to spearhead the movement. In June it released new guidance on using social media responsibly in nature. Dana Watts, the executive director, says the move was the result of feedback from land management agencies, the park service, the Bureau of Land management and the public.

Avoid geotagging specific locations, she advises, and think carefully before posting a selfie with wildlife. “Everyone wants to capture that picture, but people tend to get way too close,” she says. “If you are posting that, you are encouraging others to do the same.”

“The biggest thing we are asking people to do is stop and think,” she adds.

Shelby from Phoenix Arizona sits waiting for the sunrise.

‘It’s just going to keep growing’

At Horseshoe Bend, the Instagram crowds aren’t going anywhere soon. Beginning in April 2019, the city of Page will start charging a $10-per-car entrance fee that will go directly to pay for management of the area. But Zia, the Glen Canyon national recreational manager, expects demand to steadily increase anyway. “Between 2015 and 2017, visitation doubled,” she said. “I think it is just going to keep growing.”

In the meantime, managers are doing what they can to improve safety and protect the landscape. A metal railing now cuts across the cliff’s edge to prevent people from tumbling off. Vault toilets were added two years ago. What was once a 100-sq-ft dirt parking lot has been expanded this year to hold up to 300 cars.

A railing has been installed at the lookout point after several people fell from the edge.

On a November evening, people lined up to watch the sky turn from orange to hot pink as the sun descended. Jenny Caiazzo, 24, was visiting from Denver, touring south-west national parks with her friend. “Now that I’m here, I see it’s even more beautiful than the pictures.”

Visitors admired the view from the rim. “It’s breathtaking,” said Brett Rycen, a visitor from Australia on a coast-to-coast tour with his wife and daughter. “We’ve been Snapchatting a lot. We want our friends to know what we are experiencing.”

Nearby, Tristan Fabic and Cecille Lim from Los Angeles had just gotten engaged. “This is the place where I wanted to propose,” said Fabic. “I saw it on Instagram and thought it would be really cool.”

Reporting: Charlotte Simmonds in Oakland, California; Annette McGivney in Horseshoe Bend, Arizona; Todd Wilkinson in Yellowstone national park, Wyoming; Patrick Reilly in Glacier national park, Montana; Brian Maffly in Salt Lake City, Utah; Gabrielle Can on in Yosemite national park and Muir Woods national monument, California; Michael Wright in Gardiner, Montana; and Monte Whaley in Estes Park, Colorado

This story was reported and published in collaboration with:

This land is your land
National parks

The Journey Back to Recovery – Resources to Develop Tourism Sustainably

Photo: istock.com / narvikk

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

The travel and tourism sector faces an astounding loss of nearly 200 million jobs due to COVID-19.
Nature-based tourism, the largest, global, market-based contributor to financing protected area systems, has been especially hard hit.
For governments and tourism operators looking to rebuild the NBT sector, a new publication offers resources and tools to help grow back in a resilient and sustainable way.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic brought tourism to a halt, queues to see the world’s most beautiful, natural wonders have disappeared. Gone are the clicking sounds of photos being snapped of wildlife through big lens cameras. On many island destinations like Hawaii and Fiji, beaches have been devoid of tourists due to pandemic-related travel restrictions.

This is beneficial for the recovery of the environment in the short term, but a catastrophe for national and local economies, communities, and the small and medium enterprises that depend upon nature-based tourism (NBT) for their survival. In fact, in the long term, if tourism does not recover, it will disincentivize communities from promoting natural resource management.

Across Africa, wildlife is the single biggest driver for NBT and much of the tourism takes place in protected areas. A study found that Africa’s 8,400 protected areas generated $48 billion in direct in-country expenditures. These revenues are a key source of financing protected area systems, and as they dry up—taking income, jobs and safety nets for local communities with them— threats to nature such as poaching and logging increase, degrading the very asset on which NBT is built.

For example, Maasai Mara Community Conservancies in Kenya used to receive $7.5 million per year in lease fees from tourism partners, which benefited 14,500 landowners and 116,000 community members. Without these payments, local landowners have fewer incentives to support conservation. Uganda Wildlife Authority generated 88% of its revenues from tourism and South African National Parks (SANParks) depended on tourism for 84% of their revenues. In Indonesia, the loss of tourism revenues of up to $6 billion has reduced support for parks and has impacted small businesses that rely on tourists.

Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo closed to protect its endangered gorillas from the possible and unknown effects of COVID-19. This required cancelling 100% of their bookings and not taking new reservations, the financial effects of which have been devastating on cash flow for the park to protect the gorillas, provide support to rangers and the families of rangers who have been killed in the line of duty, and to help deliver essential disease prevention services.

Photo: Marian Galovic / Shutterstock

As tourism recovers, a new publication from the World Bank’s Environment, Natural Resources and Blue Economy (ENB) Global Practice and the Global Environment Facility-funded Global Wildlife Program is available to offer some suggestions. Tools and Resources for Nature-Based Tourism curates the wealth of knowledge and resources available on NBT topics and makes them easily accessible to practitioners as they work to restart tourism.

For example, as governments rebuild their tourism sectors or shift to new markets and models, destinations, businesses, and communities may need information on marketing, planning, visitor forecasts, crisis management, and other considerations, as well as opportunities to learn new skills and form new partnerships. They can refer to resources in the report and guidebook under the themes:

Destination Management
Concessions and Partnership Models
Nature-Based Enterprise Development
Visitor Management
Risk Management and Climate Change
Training Resources
Networks and Institutions

In compiling the report, hundreds of resources were identified through a stakeholder consultation with over 100 tourism experts, prior to the onset of the pandemic. An interactive platform also allows users to search for these resources by topics and keywords, and will be updated regularly with contributions from global practitioners as new tools are developed.

For example, the topic of concessions and partnerships models will become more important as countries look to diversify their revenue streams through tourism and beyond. The report identified 60 resources, such as “ An Introduction to Tourism Concessioning: 14 Characteristics of Successful Programs ” (IFC); “Guidelines for Tourism Partnerships and Concessions for Protected Areas” (Convention on Biological Diversity); and “ Tourism Concessions in Protected Natural Areas: Guidelines for Managers ” (UNDP). Webinars , case studies , and relevant networks and institutions are all available to provide guidance, and more will be added as they emerge.

“The sections in the report address many of the key issues confronted during the preparation and implementation of an NBT project. I can see myself going back to it again and again for information on particular issues at hand,” said Tijen Arin, a senior environmental economist with the World Bank who co-leads an NBT project in Nepal .

The NBT model that existed prior to the pandemic did not take into consideration the preservation of the environment nor did it equitably deliver benefits to local communities. In this dark cloud of the economic downturn, a silver lining is the chance to start with a clean slate and build the tourism sector back sustainably . Failure to do so, would only exacerbate the degradation of the natural assets that communities and tourism rely on and reduce economic and ecological benefits over the long term.

This one-stop platform can help provide the resources on recovery strategies and impacts that are needed to put conservation at the core of sustainable tourism.

* Dr. Claudia Sobrevila, Senior Environmental Specialist and Global Wildlife Program Manager at the World Bank, provided insightful guidance and helped conceptualize Tools and Resources for Nature-Based Tourism. She sadly passed away during its production, but strongly believed in “finding creative solutions to protect wildlife and building economic opportunities for local communities.”

Website: Global Wildlife Program

Feature Story: Risking Lives to Protect Wildlife and Wildlands: Stories from Rangers in the Field

Blog: A green economic recovery for South Asia

Feature Story: Growing Wildlife-Based Tourism Sustainably: A New Report and Q&A

Feature Story: Ramping up Nature-Based Tourism to Protect Biodiversity and Boost Livelihoods

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Open access
Published: 31 March 2023

The benefits of tourism for rural community development

Yung-Lun Liu 1 ,
Jui-Te Chiang 2 &
Pen-Fa Ko 2

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume 10 , Article number: 137 ( 2023 ) Cite this article

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Business and management
Development studies

While the main benefits of rural tourism have been studied extensively, most of these studies have focused on the development of sustainable rural tourism. The role of tourism contributions to rural community development remains unexplored. Little is known about what tourism contribution dimensions are available for policy-makers and how these dimensions affect rural tourism contributions. Without a clear picture and indication of what benefits rural tourism can provide for rural communities, policy-makers might not invest limited resources in such projects. The objectives of this study are threefold. First, we outline a rural tourism contribution model that policy-makers can use to support tourism-based rural community development. Second, we address several methodological limitations that undermine current sustainability model development and recommend feasible methodological solutions. Third, we propose a six-step theoretical procedure as a guideline for constructing a valid contribution model. We find four primary attributes of rural tourism contributions to rural community development; economic, sociocultural, environmental, and leisure and educational, and 32 subattributes. Ultimately, we confirm that economic benefits are the most significant contribution. Our findings have several practical and methodological implications and could be used as policy-making guidelines for rural community development.

Creativity development of tourism villages in Bandung Regency, Indonesia: co-creating sustainability and urban resilience

Rd Ahmad Buchari, Abdillah Abdillah, … Heru Nurasa

Eco-tourism, climate change, and environmental policies: empirical evidence from developing economies

Yunfeng Shang, Chunyu Bi, … Ehsan Rasoulinezhad

Knowledge mapping of relative deprivation theory and its applicability in tourism research

Jinyu Pan & Zhenzhi Yang

Introduction

In many countries, rural areas are less developed than urban areas. They are often perceived as having many problems, such as low productivity, low education, and low income. Other issues include population shifts from rural to urban areas, low economic growth, declining employment opportunities, the loss of farms, impacts on historical and cultural heritage, sharp demographic changes, and low quality of life. These issues indicate that maintaining agricultural activities without change might create deeper social problems in rural regions. Li et al. ( 2019 ) analyzed why some rural areas decline while others do not. They emphasized that it is necessary to improve rural communities’ resilience by developing new tourism activities in response to potential urban demands. In addition, to overcome the inevitability of rural decline, Markey et al. ( 2008 ) pointed out that reversing rural recession requires investment orientation and policy support reform, for example, regarding tourism. Therefore, adopting rural tourism as an alternative development approach has become a preferred strategy in efforts to balance economic, social, cultural, and environmental regeneration.

Why should rural regions devote themselves to tourism-based development? What benefits can rural tourism bring to a rural community, particularly during and after the COVID pandemic? Without a clear picture and answers to these questions, policy-makers might not invest limited resources in such projects. Understanding the contributions of rural tourism to rural community development is critical for helping government and community planners realize whether rural tourism development is beneficial. Policy-makers are aware that reducing rural vulnerability and enhancing rural resilience is a necessary but challenging task; therefore, it is important to consider the equilibrium between rural development and potential negative impacts. For example, economic growth may improve the quality of life and enhance the well-being index. However, it may worsen income inequality, increase the demand for green landscapes, and intensify environmental pollution, and these changes may impede natural preservation in rural regions and make local residents’ lives more stressful. This might lead policy-makers to question whether they should support tourism-based rural development. Thus, the provision of specific information on the contributions of rural tourism is crucial for policy-makers.

Recently, most research has focused on rural sustainable tourism development (Asmelash and Kumar, 2019 ; Polukhina et al., 2021 ), and few studies have considered the contributions of rural tourism. Sustainability refers to the ability of a destination to maintain production over time in the face of long-term constraints and pressures (Altieri et al., 2018 ). In this study, we focus on rural tourism contributions, meaning what rural tourism contributes or does to help produce something or make it better or more successful. More specifically, we focus on rural tourism’s contributions, not its sustainability, as these goals and directions differ. Today, rural tourism has responded to the new demand trends of short-term tourists, directly providing visitors with unique services and opportunities to contact other business channels. The impact on the countryside is multifaceted, but many potential factors have not been explored (Arroyo et al., 2013 ; Tew and Barbieri, 2012 ). For example, the demand for remote nature-based destinations has increased due to the fear of COVID-19 infection, the perceived risk of crowding, and a desire for low tourist density. Juschten and Hössinger ( 2020 ) showed that the impact of COVID-19 led to a surge in demand for natural parks, forests, and rural areas. Vaishar and Šťastná ( 2022 ) demonstrated that the countryside is gaining more domestic tourists due to natural, gastronomic, and local attractions. Thus, they contended that the COVID-19 pandemic created rural tourism opportunities.

Following this change in tourism demand, rural regions are no longer associated merely with agricultural commodity production. Instead, they are seen as fruitful locations for stimulating new socioeconomic activities and mitigating public mental health issues (Kabadayi et al., 2020 ). Despite such new opportunities in rural areas, there is still a lack of research that provides policy-makers with information about tourism development in rural communities (Petrovi’c et al., 2018 ; Vaishar and Šťastná, 2022 ). Although there are many novel benefits that tourism can bring to rural communities, these have not been considered in the rural community development literature. For example, Ram et al. ( 2022 ) showed that the presence of people with mental health issues, such as nonclinical depression, is negatively correlated with domestic tourism, such as rural tourism. Yang et al. ( 2021 ) found that the contribution of rural tourism to employment is significant; they indicated that the proportion of nonagricultural jobs had increased by 99.57%, and tourism in rural communities had become the leading industry at their research site in China, with a value ten times higher than that of agricultural output. Therefore, rural tourism is vital in counteracting public mental health issues and can potentially advance regional resilience, identity, and well-being (López-Sanz et al., 2021 ).

Since the government plays a critical role in rural tourism development, providing valuable insights, perspectives, and recommendations to policy-makers to foster sustainable policies and practices in rural destinations is essential (Liu et al., 2020 ). Despite the variables developed over time to address particular aspects of rural tourism development, there is still a lack of specific variables and an overall measurement framework for understanding the contributions of rural tourism. Therefore, more evidence is needed to understand how rural tourism influences rural communities from various structural perspectives and to prompt policy-makers to accept rural tourism as an effective development policy or strategy for rural community development. In this paper, we aim to fill this gap.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: the section “Literature review” presents the literature review. Our methodology is described in the section “Methodology”, and our results are presented in the section “Results”. Our discussion in the section “Discussion/implications” places our findings in perspective by describing their theoretical and practical implications, and we provide concluding remarks in the section “Conclusion”.

Literature review

The role of rural tourism.

The UNWTO ( 2021 ) defined rural tourism as a type of tourism in which a visitor’s experience is related to a wide range of products generally linked to nature-based activity, agriculture, rural lifestyle/culture, angling, and sightseeing. Rural tourism has been used as a valid developmental strategy in rural areas in many developed and developing countries. This developmental strategy aims to enable a rural community to grow while preserving its traditional culture (Kaptan et al., 2020 ). In rural areas, ongoing encounters and interactions between humans and nature occur, as well as mutual transformations. These phenomena take place across a wide range of practices that are spatially and temporally bound, including agriculture, forestry, fishing, hunting, farm tourism, cultural heritage preservation, and country life (Hegarty and Przezbórska, 2005 ). To date, rural tourism in many places has become an important new element of the regional rural economy; it is increasing in importance as both a strategic sector and a way to boost the development of rural regions (Polukhina et al., 2021 ). Urban visitors’ demand for short-term leisure activities has increased because of the COVID-19 pandemic (Slater, 2020 ). Furthermore, as tourists shifted their preferences from exotic to local rural tourism amid COVID-19, Marques et al. ( 2022 ) suggested that this trend is a new opportunity that should be seized, as rural development no longer relies on agriculture alone. Instead, other practices, such as rural tourism, have become opportunities for rural areas. Ironically, urbanization has both caused severe problems in rural areas and stimulated rural tourism development as an alternative means of economic revitalization (Lewis and Delisle, 2004 ). Rural tourism provides many unique events and activities that people who live in urban areas are interested in, such as agricultural festivals, crafts, historical buildings, natural preservation, nostalgia, cuisine, and opportunities for family togetherness and relaxation (Christou, 2020 ; Getz, 2008 ). As rural tourism provides visitors from urban areas with various kinds of psychological, educational, social, esthetic, and physical satisfaction, it has brought unprecedented numbers of tourists to rural communities, stimulated economic growth, improved the viability of these communities, and enhanced their living standards (Nicholson and Pearce, 2001 ). For example, rural tourism practitioners have obtained significant economic effects, including more income, more direct sales, better profit margins, and more opportunities to sell agricultural products or craft items (Everett and Slocum, 2013 ). Local residents can participate in the development of rural tourism, and it does not necessarily depend on external resources. Hence, it provides entrepreneurial opportunities (Lee et al., 2006 ). From an environmental perspective, rural tourism is rooted in a contemporary theoretical shift from cherishing local agricultural resources to restoring the balance between people and ecosystems. Thus, rural land is preserved, natural landscapes are maintained, and green consumerism drives farmers to focus on organic products, green chemistry, and value-added products, such as land ethics (Higham and Ritchie, 2001 ). Therefore, the potential contributions of rural tourism are significant and profound (Marques, 2006 ; Phillip et al., 2010 ). Understanding its contributions to rural community development could encourage greater policy-maker investment and resident support (Yang et al., 2010 ).

Contributions of rural tourism to rural community development

Maintaining active local communities while preventing the depopulation and degradation of rural areas requires a holistic approach and processes that support sustainability. What can rural tourism contribute to rural development? In the literature, rural tourism has been shown to bring benefits such as stimulating economic growth (Oh, 2005 ), strengthening rural and regional economies (Lankford, 1994 ), alleviating poverty (Zhao et al., 2007 ), and improving living standards in local communities (Uysal et al., 2016 ). In addition to these economic contributions, what other elements have not been identified and discussed (Su et al., 2020 )? To answer these questions, additional evidence is a prerequisite. Thus, this study examines the following four aspects. (1) The economic perspective: The clustering of activities offered by rural tourism stimulates cooperation and partnerships between local communities and serves as a vehicle for creating various economic benefits. For example, rural tourism improves employment opportunities and stability, local residents’ income, investment, entrepreneurial opportunities, agricultural production value-added, capital formation, economic resilience, business viability, and local tax revenue (Atun et al., 2019 ; Cheng and Zhang, 2020 ; Choi and Sirakaya, 2006 ; Chong and Balasingam, 2019 ; Cunha et al., 2020 ). (2) The sociocultural perspective: Rural tourism no longer refers solely to the benefits of agricultural production; through economic improvement, it represents a greater diversity of activities. It is important to take advantage of the novel social and cultural alternatives offered by rural tourism, which contribute to the countryside. For example, rural tourism can be a vehicle for introducing farmers to potential new markets through more interactions with consumers and other value chain members. Under such circumstances, the sociocultural benefits of rural tourism are multifaceted. These include improved rural area depopulation prevention (López-Sanz et al., 2021 ), cultural and heritage preservation, and enhanced social stability compared to farms that do not engage in the tourism business (Ma et al., 2021 ; Yang et al., 2021 ). Additional benefits are improved quality of life; revitalization of local crafts, customs, and cultures; restoration of historical buildings and community identities; and increased opportunities for social contact and exchange, which enhance community visibility, pride, and cultural integrity (Kelliher et al., 2018 ; López-Sanz et al., 2021 ; Ryu et al., 2020 ; Silva and Leal, 2015 ). (3) The environmental perspective: Many farms in rural areas have been rendered noncompetitive due to a shortage of labor, poor managerial skills, and a lack of financial support (Coria and Calfucura, 2012 ). Although there can be immense pressure to maintain a farm in a family and to continue using land for agriculture, these problems could cause families to sell or abandon their farms or lands (Tew and Barbieri, 2012 ). In addition, unless new income pours into rural areas, farm owners cannot preserve their land and its natural aspects; thus, they tend to allow their land to become derelict or sell it. In the improved economic conditions after farms diversify into rural tourism, rural communities have more money to provide environmental care for their natural scenic areas, pastoral resources, forests, wetlands, biodiversity, pesticide mitigation, and unique landscapes (Theodori, 2001 ; Vail and Hultkrantz, 2000 ). Ultimately, the entire image of a rural community is affected; the community is imbued with vitality, and farms that participate in rural tourism instill more togetherness among families and rural communities. In this study, the environmental benefits induced by rural tourism led to improved natural environmental conservation, biodiversity, environmental awareness, infrastructure, green chemistry, unspoiled land, and family land (Di and Laura, 2021 ; Lane, 1994 ; Ryu et al., 2020 ; Yang et al., 2021 ). (4) The leisure and educational perspective: Rural tourism is a diverse strategy associated with an ongoing flow of development models that commercialize a wide range of farming practices for residents and visitors. Rural territories often present a rich set of unique resources that, if well managed, allow multiple appealing, authentic, and memorable tourist experiences. Tourists frequently comment that the rural tourism experience positively contrasts with the stress and other negatively perceived conditions of daily urban life. This is reflected in opposing, compelling images of home and a visited rural destination (Kastenholz et al., 2012 ). In other words, tourists’ positive experiences result from the attractions and activities of rural tourism destinations that may be deemed sensorially, symbolically, or socially opposed to urban life (Kastenholz et al. 2018 ). These experiences are associated with the “search for authenticity” in the context of the tension between the nostalgic images of an idealized past and the demands of stressful modern times. Although visitors search for the psychological fulfillment of hedonic, self-actualization, challenge, accomplishment, exploration, and discovery goals, some authors have uncovered the effects of rural tourism in a different context. For example, Otto and Ritchie ( 1996 ) revealed that the quality of a rural tourism service provides a tourist experience in four dimensions—hedonic, peace of mind, involvement, and recognition. Quadri-Felitti and Fiore ( 2013 ) identified the relevant impact of education, particularly esthetics, versus memory on satisfaction in wine tourism. At present, an increasing number of people and families are seeking esthetic places for relaxation and family reunions, particularly amid COVID-19. Rural tourism possesses such functions; it remains a novel phenomenon for visitors who live in urban areas and provides leisure and educational benefits when visitors to a rural site contemplate the landscape or participate in an agricultural process for leisure purposes (WTO, 2020 ). Tourists can obtain leisure and educational benefits, including ecological knowledge, information about green consumerism, leisure and recreational opportunities, health and food security, reduced mental health issues, and nostalgia nurturing (Alford and Jones, 2020 ; Ambelu et al., 2018 ; Christou, 2020 ; Lane, 1994 ; Li et al., 2021 ). These four perspectives possess a potential synergy, and their effects could strengthen the relationship between rural families and rural areas and stimulate new regional resilience. Therefore, rural tourism should be understood as an enabler of rural community development that will eventually attract policy-makers and stakeholders to invest more money in developing or advancing it.

Methodology

The literature on rural tourism provides no generally accepted method for measuring its contributions or sustainability intensity. Although many statistical methods are available, several limitations remain, particularly in terms of the item generation stage and common method bias (CMB). For example, Marzo-Navar et al. ( 2015 ) used the mean and SD values to obtain their items. However, the use of the mean has been criticized because it is susceptible to extreme values or outliers. In addition, they did not examine omitted variables and CMB. Asmelash and Kumar ( 2019 ) used the Delphi method with a mean value for deleting items. Although they asked experts to suggest the inclusion of any missed variables, they did not discuss these results. Moreover, they did not assess CMB. Islam et al. ( 2021 ) used a sixteen-step process to formulate sustainability indicators but did not consider omitted variables, a source of endogeneity bias. They also did not designate a priority for each indicator. Although a methodologically sound systematic review is commonly used, little attention has been given to reporting interexpert reliability when multiple experts are used to making decisions at various points in the screening and data extraction stages (Belur et al., 2021 ). Due to the limitations of the current methods for assessing sustainable tourism development, we aim to provide new methodological insights. Specifically, we suggest a six-stage procedure, as shown in Fig. 1 .

Steps required in developing the model for analysis after obtaining the data.

Many sources of data collection can be used, including literature reviews, inferences about the theoretical definition of the construct, previous theoretical and empirical research on the focal construct, advice from experts in the field, interviews, and focus groups. In this study, the first step was to retrieve data from a critical literature review. The second step was the assessment of omitted variables to produce items that fully captured all essential aspects of the focal construct domain. In this case, researchers must not omit a necessary measure or fail to include all of the critical dimensions of the construct. In addition, the stimuli of CMB, for example, double-barreled items, items containing ambiguous or unfamiliar terms, and items with a complicated syntax, should be simplified and made specific and concise. That is, researchers should delete items contaminated by CMB. The third step was the examination of construct-irrelevant variance to retain the variances relevant to the construct of interest and minimize the extent to which the items tapped concepts outside the focal construct domain. Variances irrelevant to the targeted construct should be deleted. The fourth step was to examine intergroup consistency to ensure that there was no outlier impact underlying the ratings. The fifth step was to examine interexpert reliability to ensure rating conformity. Finally, we prioritized the importance of each variable with the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (AHP), which is a multicriteria decision-making approach. All methods used in this study are expert-based approaches.

Selection of experts

Because this study explores the contributions of rural tourism to rural community development, it involves phenomena in the postdevelopment stage; therefore, a few characteristics are essential for determining the choice of experts. The elements used to identify the experts in this study were (1) the number of experts, (2) expertise, (3) knowledge, (4) diversity, (5) years working in this field, and 5) commitment to participation. Regarding the number of experts, Murphy-Black et al. ( 1998 ) suggested that the more participants there are, the better, as a higher number reduces the effects of expert attrition and rater bias. Taylor-Powell ( 2002 ) pointed out that the number of participants in an expert-based study depends not only on the purpose of the research but also on the diversity of the target population. Okoli and Pawlowski ( 2004 ) recommended a target number of 10–18 experts for such a purpose. Therefore, we recruited a group of 18 experts based on their stated interest in the topic and asked them to comment on our rationale concerning the rating priorities among the items. We asked them to express a degree of agreement or disagreement with each item we provided. We adopted a heterogeneous and anonymous arrangement to ensure that rater bias did not affect this study. The 18 experts had different backgrounds, which might have made it easier for them to reach a consensus objectively. We divided the eighteen experts into three subgroups: (1) at least six top managers from rural tourism businesses, all of whom had been in the rural tourism business for over 10 years; (2) at least six academics who taught subjects related to tourism at three different universities in Taiwan; and (3) at least six government officials involved in rural development issues in Taiwan.

Generating items to represent the construct

Step 1: data collection.

Data collection provides evidence for investigation and reflects the construct of interest. While there is a need to know what rural tourism contributes, previous studies have provided no evidence for policy-makers to establish a rural community strategy; thus, it is essential to use a second source to achieve this aim. We used a literature review for specific topics; the data we used were based on the findings being presented in papers on rural tourism indexed in the SSCI (Social Sciences Citation Index) and SCIE (Science Citation Index Expanded). In this study, we intended to explore the role of rural tourism and its contributions to rural development. Therefore, we explored the secondary literature on the state of the questions of rural development, sustainable development, sustainability indicators, regional resilience, farm tourism, rural tourism, COVID-19, tourist preferences, and ecotourism using terms such as land ethics, ecology, biodiversity, green consumerism, environmentalism, green chemistry, community identity, community integration, community visibility, and development goals in an ad hoc review of previous studies via Google Scholar. Based on the outcomes of this first data collection step, we generated thirty-three subattributes and classified them into four domains.

Step 2: Examine the face validity of omitted variables and CMB

Face validity is defined as assessing whether a measurement scale or questionnaire includes all the necessary items (Dempsey and Dempsey, 1992 ). Based on the first step, we generated data subattributes from our literature review. However, there might have been other valuable attributes or subattributes that were not considered or excluded. Therefore, our purposes for examining face validity were twofold. First, we assessed the omitted variables, defined as the occurrence of crucial aspects or facets that were omitted (Messick, 1995 ). These comprise a threat to construct validity that, if ignored by researchers, might result in unreliable findings. In other words, face validity is used to distinguish whether the researchers have adequately captured the full dimensions of the construct of interest. If not, the evaluation instrument or model is deficient. However, the authors found that most rural tourism studies have not assessed the issue of omitted variables (An and Alarcon, 2020 ; Lin, 2022 ). Second, we mitigated the CMB effect. In a self-report survey, it is necessary to provide a questionnaire without CMB to the targeted respondents, as CMB affects respondent comprehension. Therefore, we assessed item characteristic effects, item context effects, and question response process effects. These three effects are related to the respondents’ understanding, retrieval, mood, affectivity, motivation, judgment, response selection, and response reporting (Podsakoff et al., 2003 ). Specifically, items containing flaws from these three groups in a questionnaire can seriously influence an empirical investigation and potentially result in misleading conclusions. We assessed face validity by asking all the experts to scrutinize the content items that we collected from the literature review and the questionnaire that we drafted. The experts could then add any attribute or subattribute they thought was essential that had been omitted. They could also revise the questionnaire if CMB were embedded. We added the new attributes or subattributes identified by the experts to those collected from the literature review.

Step 3: Examine interexpert consensus for construct-irrelevant variances

After examining face validity, we needed to rule out items irrelevant to the construct of interest; otherwise, the findings would be invalid. We examined the interexpert consensus to achieve this aim. The purpose was to estimate the experts’ ratings of each item. In other words, interexpert consensus assesses the extent to which experts make the same ratings (Kozlowski and Hattrup, 1992 ; Northcote et al., 2008 ). In prior studies, descriptive statistics have often been used to capture the variability among individual characteristics, responses, or contributions to the subject group (Landeta, 2006 ; Roberson et al., 2007 ). Many expert-based studies have applied descriptive statistics to determine consensus and quantify its degree (Paraskevas and Saunders, 2012 ; Stewart et al., 2016 ). Two main groups of descriptive statistics, central tendencies (mode, mean, and median) and level of dispersion (standard deviation, interquartile, and coefficient of variation), are commonly used when determining consensus (Mukherjee et al., 2015 ). Choosing the cutoff point of interexpert consensus was critical because we used it as a yardstick for item retention and its value can also be altered by a number on the Likert scale (Förster and von der Gracht, 2014 ). In the case of a 5-point Likert scale, the coefficient of variation (CV) is used to measure interexpert consensus. Hence, CV ≤ 0.3 indicated high consensus (Zinn et al., 2001 ). In addition, based on the feedback obtained from the expert panel, we used standard deviation (SD) as another measurement to assess the variation in our population. Henning and Jordaan ( 2016 ) indicate that SD ≤ 1 represents a high level of consensus, meaning that it can act as a guideline for cutoff points. In addition, following Vergani et al. ( 2022 ), we used the percentage agreement (% AGR) to examine interexpert consensus. If the responses reached ≧ 70% 4 and 5 in the case of a 5-point Likert scale, it indicated that the item had interexpert consensus; thus, we could retain it. Moreover, to avoid the impact of outliers, we used the median instead of the mean as another measurement. Items had a high consensus if their median value was ≥4.00 (Rice, 2009 ). Considering these points, we adopted % AGR, median, SD, and CV to examine interexpert consensus.

Step 4: Examine intergroup consistency

In this expert-based study, the sample size was small. Any rater bias could have caused inconsistency among the subgroups of experts; therefore, we needed to examine the effect of rater bias on intergroup consistency. When the intergroup ratings showed substantially different distributions, the aggregated data were groundless. Dajani et al. ( 1979 ) remarked that interexpert consensus is meaningless if the consistency of responses in a study is not reached, as it means that any rater bias could distort the median, SD, or CV. Most studies have used one-way ANOVA to determine whether there is a significant difference between the expected and observed frequency in three or more categories. However, this method is based on large sample size and normal distribution. In the case of expert-based studies, the expert sample size is small, and the assessment distribution tends to be skewed. Thus, we used the nonparametric test instead of one-way ANOVA for consistency measurement (Potvin and Roff, 1993 ). We used the Kruskal‒Wallis test (K–W) to test the intergroup consistency among the three subgroups of experts. The purpose of the K–W test is to determine whether there are significant differences among three or more subgroups regarding the ratings of the domains (Huck, 2004 ). The judgment criteria in the K-W test depended on the level of significance, and we set the significance level at p < 0.05 (Love and Irani, 2004 ), with no significant differences among groups set at p > 0.05 (Loftus et al., 2000 ; Rice, 2009 ). We used SPSS to conduct the K–W test to assess intergroup consistency in this study.

Step 5: Examine interexpert reliability

Interexpert reliability, on the one hand, is usually defined as the proportion of systematic variance to the total variance in ratings (James et al., 1984 ). On the other hand, interexpert reliability estimation is not concerned with the exact or absolute value of ratings. Rather, it measures the relative ordering or ranking of rated objects. Thus, interexpert reliability estimation concerns the consistency of ratings (Tinsley and Weiss, 1975 ). If an expert-based study did not achieve interexpert reliability, we could not trust its analysis (Singletary, 1994 ). Thus, we examined interexpert reliability in this expert-based study. Many methods are available in the literature for measuring interexpert reliability, but there seems to be little consensus on a standard method. We used Kendall’s W to assess the reliability among the experts for each sample group (Goetz et al., 1994 ) because it was available for any sample size or ordinal number. If W was 1, all the experts were unanimous, and each had assigned the same order to the list of objects or concerns. As Spector et al. ( 2002 ) and Schilling ( 2002 ) suggested, reliabilities well above the recommended value of .70 indicate sufficient internal reliability. In this study, there was a strong consensus when W > 0.7. W > 0.5 represented a moderate consensus; and W < 0.3 indicated weak interexpert agreement (Schmidt et al., 2001 ). To measure Kendall’s W , we used SPSS 23 to assess interexpert reliability.

Step 6: Examine the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process

After examining face validity, interexpert consensus, intergroup consistency, and interexpert reliability, we found that the aggregated items were relevant, authentic, and reliable in relation to the construct of interest. To provide policy-makers with a clear direction regarding which contributions are more or less important, we scored each attribute and subattribute using a multicriteria decision-making technique. Fuzzy AHP is a well-known decision-making tool for modeling unstructured problems. It enables decision-makers to model a complex issue in a hierarchical structure that indicates the relationships between the goal, criteria, and subcriteria on the basis of scores (Park and Yoon, 2011 ). The fuzzy AHP method tolerates vagueness and ambiguity (Mikhailov and Tsvetinov, 2004 ). In other words, fuzzy AHP can capture a human’s appraisal of ambiguity when considering complex, multicriteria decision-making problems (Erensal et al., 2006 ). In this study, we used Power Choice 2.5 software to run fuzzy AHP, determine weights, and develop the impact structure of rural tourism on sustainable rural development.

Face validity

To determine whether we had omitted variables, we asked all 18 experts to scrutinize our list of four attributes and 33 subattributes for omitted variables and determine whether the questionnaire contained any underlying CMB. We explained the meaning of omitted variables, the stimuli of CMB, and the two purposes of examining face validity to all the experts. In their feedback, the eighteen experts added one item as an omitted variable: business viability. The experts suggested no revisions to the questionnaire we had drafted. These results indicated that one omitted variable was revealed and that our prepared questionnaire was clear, straightforward, and understandable. The initially pooled 34 subattributes represented the construct of interest, and all questionnaires used for measurement were defendable in terms of CMB. The biasing effects of method variance did not exist, indicating that the threat of CMB was minor.

Interexpert consensus

In this step, we rejected any items irrelevant to the construct of interest. Consensus measurement played an essential role in aggregating the experts’ judgments. This study measured the AGR, median, SD, and CV. Two items, strategic alliance (AGR = 50%) and carbon neutrality (AGR = 56%) were rated < 70%, and we rejected them accordingly. These results are shown in Table 1 . The AGR, median, SD, and CV values were all greater than the cutoff points, thus indicating that the majority of experts in this study consistently recognized high values and reached a consensus for the rest of the 32 subattributes. Consequently, the four attributes and 32 subattributes remained and were initially identified as determinants for further analysis.

Intergroup consistency and interexpert reliability

In this study, with scores based on a 5-point Likert scale, we conducted the K–W test to assess intergroup differences for each subattribute. Based on the outcomes, the K–W test yielded significant results for all 32 subattributes; all three groups of experts reached consistency at p > 0.05. This result indicated that no outlier or extreme value underlay the ratings, and therefore, intergroup consistency was reached. Finally, we measured interexpert reliability with Kendall’s W . The economic perspective was W = 0.73, the sociocultural perspective was W = 0.71, the environmental perspective was W = 0.71, and the leisure and educational perspective was W = 0.72. These four groups of W were all ≧ 0.7, indicating high reliability for the ranking order and convergence judged by all subgroup experts. These results are shown in Table 2 .

The hierarchical framework

The results of this study indicate that rural tourism contributions to rural community development comprise four attributes and thirty-two subattributes. The economic perspective encompasses nine subattributes and is weighted at w = 0.387. In addition, rural tourism has long been considered a possible means of sociocultural development and regeneration of rural areas, particularly those affected by the decline in traditional rural

activities, agricultural festivals, and historical buildings. According to the desired benefits, the sociocultural perspective encompasses nine subattributes and is weighted at w = 0.183. Moreover, as rural tourism can develop on farms and locally, its contribution to maintaining and enhancing environmental regeneration and protection is significant. Therefore, an environmental perspective can determine rural tourism’s impact on pursuing environmental objectives. Our results indicate that the environmental perspective encompasses seven subattributes and that its weight is w = 0.237. Furthermore, the leisure and educational perspective indicates the attractiveness of rural tourism from visitors’ viewpoint and their perception of a destination’s value and contributions. These results show that this perspective encompasses seven subattributes and is weighted at w = 0.193. This specific contribution model demonstrates a 3-level hierarchical structure, as shown in Fig. 2 . The scores for each criterion could indicate each attribute’s importance and explain the priority order of the groups. Briefly, the critical sequence of each measure in the model at Level 2 is as follows: economic perspective > environmental perspective > leisure and educational perspective > sociocultural perspective. Since scoring and ranking were provided by 18 experts from three different backgrounds and calculated using fuzzy AHP, our rural tourism contribution model is established. It can provide policy-makers with information on the long-term benefits and advantages following the completion of excellent community development in rural areas.

The priority index of each attribute and sub-attribute.

Discussion/Implications

In the era of sustainable rural development, it is vital to consider the role of rural tourism and how research in this area shapes access to knowledge on rural community development. This study provides four findings based on the increasing tendency of policy-makers to use such information to shape their policy-making priorities. It first shows that the demand for rural tourism has soared, particularly during COVID-19. Second, it lists four significant perspectives regarding the specific contributions of rural tourism to rural community development and delineates how these four perspectives affect rural tourism development. Our findings are consistent with those of prior studies. For example, geography has been particularly important in the rural or peripheral tourism literature (Carson, 2018 ). In terms of the local geographical context, two contributions could be made by rural tourism. The first stems from the environmental perspective. When a rural community develops rural tourism, environmental protection awareness is increased, and the responsible utilization of natural resources is promoted. This finding aligns with Lee and Jan ( 2019 ). The second stems from the leisure and educational perspective. The geographical context of a rural community, which provides tourists with geographical uniqueness, advances naturally calming, sensory-rich, and emotion-generating experiences for tourists. These results suggest that rural tourism will likely positively impact tourists’ experience. This finding is consistent with Kastenhoz et al. ( 2020 ). Third, although expert-based approaches have considerable benefits in developing and testing underlying phenomena, evidence derived from interexpert consensus, intergroup consistency, and interexpert reliability has been sparse. This study provides such evidence. Fourth, this research shows that rural tourism makes four main contributions, economic, sociocultural, environmental, leisure, and educational, to rural community development. Our results show four key indicators at Level 2. The economic perspective is strongly regarded as the most important indicator, followed by the environmental perspective, leisure and educational perspective, and sociocultural perspective, which is weighted as the least important. The secondary determinants of contributions have 32 subindicators at Level 3: each was identified and assigned a different weight. These results imply that the attributes or subattributes with high weights have more essential roles in understanding the contributions of rural tourism to rural community development. Policy-makers can use these 32 subindicators to formulate rural tourism development policies or strategies.

This study offers the following five practical implications for policymakers and rural communities:

First, we argue that developing rural tourism within a rural community is an excellent strategy for revitalization and countering the effects of urbanization, depopulation, deforestation, and unemployment.

Second, our analytical results indicate that rural tourism’s postdevelopment contribution is significant from the economic, sociocultural, environmental, leisure, and educational perspectives, which is consistent with Lee and Jan ( 2019 ).

Third, there is an excellent opportunity to build or invest more in rural tourism during COVID-19, not only because of the functions of rural tourism but also because of its timing. Many prior studies have echoed this recommendation. For example, Yang et al. ( 2021 ) defined rural tourism as the leading industry in rural areas, offering an output value ten times higher than that of agriculture in China. In addition, rural tourism has become more attractive to urban tourists amid COVID-19. Vaishar and Šťastná ( 2022 ) suggested that the COVID-19 pandemic created a strong demand for rural tourism, which can mitigate threats to public mental health, such as anxiety, depression, loneliness, isolation, and insomnia. Marques et al. ( 2022 ) showed that tourists’ preference for tourism in rural areas increased substantially during COVID-19.

Fourth, the contributions of this study to policy development are substantial. The more focused rural tourism in rural areas is, the more effective revitalization becomes. This finding highlights the importance of such features in developing rural tourism to enhance rural community development from multiple perspectives. This finding echoes Zawadka et al. ( 2022 ); i.e., policy-makers should develop rural tourism to provide tourists with a safe and relaxed environment and should not ignore the value of this model for rural tourism.

Fifth, our developed model could drive emerging policy issues from a supporting perspective and provide policy-makers with a more comprehensive overview of the development of the rural tourism sector, thus enabling them to create better policies and programs as needed. For example, amid COVID-19, rural tourism created a safe environment for tourists, mainly by reducing their fears of contamination (Dennis et al., 2021 ). This novel contribution that rural tourism destinations can provide to residents and visitors from other places should be considered and built into any rural community development policy.

This study also has the following four methodological implications for researchers:

First, it addresses methodological limitations that still impede tourism sustainability model development. Specifically, we suggest a six-stage procedure as the guideline; it is imperative that rural tourism researchers or model developers follow this procedure. If they do not, their findings tend to be flawed.

Second, to ensure that collected data are without extraneous interference or differences via subgroups of experts, the assessment of intergroup consistency with the K–W test instead of one-way ANOVA is proposed, especially in small samples and distribution-free studies.

Third, providing interexpert reliability evidence within expert-based research is critical; we used Kendall’s W to assess the reliability among experts for each sample group because it applies to any sample size and ordinal number.

Finally, we recommend using fuzzy AHP to establish a model with appropriate indicators for decision-making or selection. This study offers novel methodological insights by estimating a theoretically grounded and empirically validated rural tourism contribution model.

There are two limitations to this study. First, we examine all subattributes by interexpert consensus to delete construct-irrelevant variances that might receive criticism for their lack of statistical rigor. Future studies can use other rigorous methods, such as AD M( j ) or rWG ( j ) , interexpert agreement indices to assess and eliminate construct-irrelevant variances. Second, we recommend maximizing rural tourism contributions to rural community development by using the general population as a sample to identify any differences. More specifically, we recommend using Cronbach’s alpha, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), and structural equation modeling (SEM) to test the overall reliability and validity of the data and results. It is also necessary to provide results for goodness-of-fit measures—e.g., the goodness-of-fit index (GFI), adjusted goodness-of-fit index (AGFI), comparative fit index (CFI), normed fit index (NFI), Tucker–Lewis Index (TLI), standardized root mean square residual (SRMR), or root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA).

Numerous empirical studies have illustrated how rural tourism can positively and negatively affect the contexts in rural areas where it is present. This study reveals the positive contributions of rural tourism to rural community development. The findings show that using rural tourism as a revitalization strategy is beneficial to nonurban communities in terms of their economic, sociocultural, environmental, and leisure and educational development. The contribution from the economic perspective is particularly important. These findings suggest that national, regional, and local governments or community developers should make tourism a strategic pillar in their policies for rural development and implement tourism-related development projects to gain 32 benefits, as indicated in Fig. 2 . More importantly, rural tourism was advocated and proved effective for tourists and residents to reduce anxiety, depression, or insomnia during the COVID-19 pandemic. With this emerging contribution, rural tourism is becoming more critical to tourists from urban areas and residents involved in rural community development. With this model, policy-makers should not hesitate to develop or invest more in rural communities to create additional tourism-based activities and facilities. As they could simultaneously advance rural community development and public mental health, policy-makers should include these activities among their regional resilience considerations and treat them as enablers of sustainable rural development. We conclude that amid COVID-19, developing rural tourism is an excellent strategy for promoting rural community development and an excellent alternative that could counteract the negative impacts of urbanization and provide stakeholders with more positive interests. The proposed rural tourism contribution model also suggests an unfolding research plan.

Data availability

The datasets generated and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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14 important environmental impacts of tourism + explanations + examples

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The environmental impacts of tourism have gained increasing attention in recent years.

With the rise in sustainable tourism and an increased number of initiatives for being environmentally friendly, tourists and stakeholders alike are now recognising the importance of environmental management in the tourism industry.

In this post, I will explain why the environmental impacts of tourism are an important consideration and what the commonly noted positive and negative environmental impacts of tourism are.

Why the environment is so important to tourism

Positive environmental impacts of tourism, water resources, land degradation , local resources , air pollution and noise , solid waste and littering , aesthetic pollution, construction activities and infrastructure development, deforestation and intensified or unsustainable use of land , marina development, coral reefs, anchoring and other marine activities , alteration of ecosystems by tourist activities , environmental impacts of tourism: conclusion, environmental impacts of tourism reading list.

The quality of the environment, both natural and man-made, is essential to tourism. However, tourism’s relationship with the environment is complex and many activities can have adverse environmental effects if careful tourism planning and management is not undertaken.

It is ironic really, that tourism often destroys the very things that it relies on!

Many of the negative environmental impacts that result from tourism are linked with the construction of general infrastructure such as roads and airports, and of tourism facilities, including resorts, hotels, restaurants, shops, golf courses and marinas. The negative impacts of tourism development can gradually destroy the environmental resources on which it depends.

It’s not ALL negative, however!

Tourism has the potential to create beneficial effects on the environment by contributing to environmental protection and conservation. It is a way to raise awareness of environmental values and it can serve as a tool to finance protection of natural areas and increase their economic importance.

In this article I have outlined exactly how we can both protect and destroy the environment through tourism. I have also created a new YouTube video on the environmental impacts of tourism, you can see this below. (by the way- you can help me to be able to keep content like this free for everyone to access by subscribing to my YouTube channel! And don’t forget to leave me a comment to say hi too!).

Although there are not as many (far from it!) positive environmental impacts of tourism as there are negative, it is important to note that tourism CAN help preserve the environment!

The most commonly noted positive environmental impact of tourism is raised awareness. Many destinations promote ecotourism and sustainable tourism and this can help to educate people about the environmental impacts of tourism. Destinations such as Costa Rica and The Gambia have fantastic ecotourism initiatives that promote environmentally-friendly activities and resources. There are also many national parks, game reserves and conservation areas around the world that help to promote positive environmental impacts of tourism.

Positive environmental impacts can also be induced through the NEED for the environment. Tourism can often not succeed without the environment due the fact that it relies on it (after all we can’t go on a beach holiday without a beach or go skiing without a mountain, can we?).

In many destinations they have organised operations for tasks such as cleaning the beach in order to keep the destination aesthetically pleasant and thus keep the tourists happy. Some destinations have taken this further and put restrictions in place for the number of tourists that can visit at one time.

Not too long ago the island of Borocay in the Philippines was closed to tourists to allow time for it to recover from the negative environmental impacts that had resulted from large-scale tourism in recent years. Whilst inconvenient for tourists who had planned to travel here, this is a positive example of tourism environmental management and we are beginning to see more examples such as this around the world.

Negative environmental impacts of tourism

Negative environmental impacts of tourism occur when the level of visitor use is greater than the environment’s ability to cope with this use.

Uncontrolled conventional tourism poses potential threats to many natural areas around the world. It can put enormous pressure on an area and lead to impacts such as: soil erosion , increased pollution, discharges into the sea, natural habitat loss, increased pressure on endangered species and heightened vulnerability to forest fires. It often puts a strain on water resources, and it can force local populations to compete for the use of critical resources.

I will explain each of these negative environmental impacts of tourism below.

Depletion of natural resources

Tourism development can put pressure on natural resources when it increases consumption in areas where resources are already scarce. Some of the most common noted examples include using up water resources, land degradation and the depletion of other local resources.

The tourism industry generally overuses water resources for hotels, swimming pools, golf courses and personal use of water by tourists. This can result in water shortages and degradation of water supplies, as well as generating a greater volume of waste water.

In drier regions, like the Mediterranean, the issue of water scarcity is of particular concern. Because of the hot climate and the tendency for tourists to consume more water when on holiday than they do at home, the amount used can run up to 440 litres a day. This is almost double what the inhabitants of an average Spanish city use.

Golf course maintenance can also deplete fresh water resources.

In recent years golf tourism has increased in popularity and the number of golf courses has grown rapidly.

Golf courses require an enormous amount of water every day and this can result in water scarcity. Furthermore, golf resorts are more and more often situated in or near protected areas or areas where resources are limited, exacerbating their impacts.

An average golf course in a tropical country such as Thailand needs 1500kg of chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides per year and uses as much water as 60,000 rural villagers.

brown rock formation under white and blue cloudy sky

Important land resources include fertile soil, forests , wetlands and wildlife. Unfortunately, tourism often contributes to the degradation of said resources. Increased construction of tourism facilities has increased the pressure on these resources and on scenic landscapes.

Animals are often displaced when their homes are destroyed or when they are disturbed by noise. This may result in increased animals deaths, for example road-kill deaths. It may also contribute to changes in behaviour.

Animals may become a nuisance, by entering areas that they wouldn’t (and shouldn’t) usually go into, such as people’s homes. It may also contribute towards aggressive behaviour when animals try to protect their young or savage for food that has become scarce as a result of tourism development.

Picturesque landscapes are often destroyed by tourism. Whilst many destinations nowadays have limits and restrictions on what development can occur and in what style, many do not impose any such rules. High rise hotels and buildings which are not in character with the surrounding architecture or landscape contribute to a lack of atheistic appeal.

Forests often suffer negative impacts of tourism in the form of deforestation caused by fuel wood collection and land clearing. For example, one trekking tourist in Nepal can use four to five kilograms of wood a day!

There are also many cases of erosion, whereby tourists may trek the same path or ski the same slope so frequently that it erodes the natural landscape. Sites such as Machu Pichu have been forced to introduce restrictions on tourist numbers to limit the damage caused.

picturesque scenery of grassy field in village

Tourism can create great pressure on local resources like energy, food, and other raw materials that may already be in short supply. Greater extraction and transport of these resources exacerbates the physical impacts associated with their exploitation.

Because of the seasonal character of the industry, many destinations have ten times more inhabitants in the high season as in the low season.

A high demand is placed upon these resources to meet the high expectations tourists often have (proper heating, hot water, etc.). This can put significant pressure on the local resources and infrastructure, often resulting in the local people going without in order to feed the tourism industry.

Tourism can cause the same forms of pollution as any other industry: Air emissions; noise pollution; solid waste and littering; sewage; oil and chemicals. The tourism industry also contributes to forms of architectural/visual pollution.

Transport by air, road, and rail is continuously increasing in response to the rising number of tourists and their greater mobility. In fact, tourism accounts for more than 60% of all air travel.

One study estimated that a single transatlantic return flight emits almost half the CO2 emissions produced by all other sources (lighting, heating, car use, etc.) consumed by an average person yearly- that’s a pretty shocking statistic!

I remember asking my class to calculate their carbon footprint one lesson only to be very embarrassed that my emissions were A LOT higher than theirs due to the amount of flights I took each year compared to them. Point proven I guess….

Anyway, air pollution from tourist transportation has impacts on a global level, especially from CO2 emissions related to transportation energy use. This can contribute to severe local air pollution . It also contributes towards climate change.

Fortunately, technological advancements in aviation are seeing more environmentally friendly aircraft and fuels being used worldwide, although the problem is far from being cured. If you really want to help save the environment, the answer is to seek alternative methods of transportation and avoid flying.

You can also look at ways to offset your carbon footprint .

Noise pollution can also be a concern.

Noise pollution from aircraft, cars, buses, (+ snowmobiles and jet skis etc etc) can cause annoyance, stress, and even hearing loss for humans. It also causes distress to wildlife and can cause animals to alter their natural activity patterns. Having taught at a university near London Heathrow for several years, this was always a topic of interest to my students and made a popular choice of dissertation topic .

In areas with high concentrations of tourist activities and appealing natural attractions, waste disposal is a serious problem, contributing significantly to the environmental impacts of tourism.

Improper waste disposal can be a major despoiler of the natural environment. Rivers, scenic areas, and roadsides are areas that are commonly found littered with waste, ranging from plastic bottles to sewage.

Cruise tourism in the Caribbean, for example, is a major contributor to this negative environmental impact of tourism. Cruise ships are estimated to produce more than 70,000 tons of waste each year.

The Wider Caribbean Region, stretching from Florida to French Guiana, receives 63,000 port calls from ships each year, and they generate 82,000 tons of rubbish. About 77% of all ship waste comes from cruise vessels. On average, passengers on a cruise ship each account for 3.5 kilograms of rubbish daily – compared with the 0.8 kilograms each generated by the less well-endowed folk on shore.

Whilst it is generally an unwritten rule that you do not throw rubbish into the sea, this is difficult to enforce in the open ocean . In the past cruise ships would simply dump their waste while out at sea. Nowadays, fortunately, this is less commonly the case, however I am sure that there are still exceptions.

Solid waste and littering can degrade the physical appearance of the water and shoreline and cause the death of marine animals. Just take a look at the image below. This is a picture taken of the insides of a dead bird. Bird often mistake floating plastic for fish and eat it. They can not digest plastic so once their stomachs become full they starve to death. This is all but one sad example of the environmental impacts of tourism.

Mountain areas also commonly suffer at the hands of the tourism industry. In mountain regions, trekking tourists generate a great deal of waste. Tourists on expedition frequently leave behind their rubbish, oxygen cylinders and even camping equipment. I have heard many stories of this and I also witnessed it first hand when I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro .

The construction of hotels, recreation and other facilities often leads to increased sewage pollution.

Unfortunately, many destinations, particularly in the developing world, do not have strict law enrichments on sewage disposal. As a result, wastewater has polluted seas and lakes surrounding tourist attractions around the world. This damages the flora and fauna in the area and can cause serious damage to coral reefs.

Sewage pollution threatens the health of humans and animals.

I’ll never forget the time that I went on a school trip to climb Snowdonia in Wales. The water running down the streams was so clear and perfect that some of my friends had suggested we drink some. What’s purer than mountain fresh water right from the mountain, right?

A few minutes later we saw a huge pile of (human??) feaces in the water upstream!!

Often tourism fails to integrate its structures with the natural features and indigenous architecture of the destination. Large, dominating resorts of disparate design can look out of place in any natural environment and may clash with the indigenous structural design.

A lack of land-use planning and building regulations in many destinations has facilitated sprawling developments along coastlines, valleys and scenic routes. The sprawl includes tourism facilities themselves and supporting infrastructure such as roads, employee housing, parking, service areas, and waste disposal. This can make a tourist destination less appealing and can contribute to a loss of appeal.

Physical impacts of tourism development

Whilst the tourism industry itself has a number of negative environmental impacts. There are also a number of physical impacts that arise from the development of the tourism industry. This includes the construction of buildings, marinas, roads etc.

The development of tourism facilities can involve sand mining, beach and sand dune erosion and loss of wildlife habitats.

The tourist often will not see these side effects of tourism development, but they can have devastating consequences for the surrounding environment. Animals may displaced from their habitats and the noise from construction may upset them.

I remember reading a while ago (although I can’t seem to find where now) that in order to develop the resort of Kotu in The Gambia, a huge section of the coastline was demolished in order to be able to use the sand for building purposes. This would inevitably have had severe consequences for the wildlife living in the area.

Construction of ski resort accommodation and facilities frequently requires clearing forested land.

Land may also be cleared to obtain materials used to build tourism sites, such as wood.

I’ll never forget the site when I flew over the Amazon Rainforest only to see huge areas of forest cleared. That was a sad reality to see.

Likewise, coastal wetlands are often drained due to lack of more suitable sites. Areas that would be home to a wide array of flora and fauna are turned into hotels, car parks and swimming pools.

old city port with moored ships and historical houses

The building of marinas and ports can also contribute to the negative environmental impacts of tourism.

Development of marinas and breakwaters can cause changes in currents and coastlines.

These changes can have vast impacts ranging from changes in temperatures to erosion spots to the wider ecosystem.

Coral reefs are especially fragile marine ecosystems. They suffer worldwide from reef-based tourism developments and from tourist activity.

Evidence suggests a variety of impacts to coral result from shoreline development. Increased sediments in the water can affect growth. Trampling by tourists can damage or even kill coral. Ship groundings can scrape the bottom of the sea bed and kill the coral. Pollution from sewage can have adverse effects.

All of these factors contribute to a decline and reduction in the size of coral reefs worldwide. This then has a wider impact on the global marine life and ecosystem, as many animals rely on the coral for as their habitat and food source.

Physical impacts from tourist activities

The last point worth mentioning when discussing the environmental impacts of tourism is the way in which physical impacts can occur as a result of tourist activities.

This includes tramping, anchoring, cruising and diving. The more this occurs, the more damage that is caused. Natural, this is worse in areas with mass tourism and overtourism .

unrecognizable male traveler standing on hill against misty scenic highlands

Tourists using the same trail over and over again trample the vegetation and soil, eventually causing damage that can lead to loss of biodiversity and other impacts.

Such damage can be even more extensive when visitors frequently stray off established trails. This is evidenced in Machu Pichu as well as other well known destinations and attractions, as I discussed earlier in this post.

white and black anchor with chain at daytime

In marine areas many tourist activities occur in or around fragile ecosystems.

Anchoring, scuba diving, yachting and cruising are some of the activities that can cause direct degradation of marine ecosystems such as coral reefs. As I said previously, this can have a significant knock on effect on the surrounding ecosystem.

Habitats can be degraded by tourism leisure activities.

For example, wildlife viewing can bring about stress for the animals and alter their natural behaviour when tourists come too close.

As I have articulated throughout this post, there are a range of environmental impacts that result from tourism. Whilst some are good, the majority unfortunately are bad. The answer to many of these problems boils down to careful tourism planning and management and the adoption of sustainable tourism principles.

Did you find this article helpful? Take a look at my posts on the social impacts of tourism and the economic impacts of tourism too! Oh, and follow me on social media !

If you are studying the environmental impacts of tourism or if you are interested in learning more about the environmental impacts of tourism, I have compiled a short reading list for you below.

The 3 types of travel and tourism organisations
150 types of tourism! The ultimate tourism glossary
50 fascinating facts about the travel and tourism industry

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Tourism & Natural Resources

Tourism is a global phenomenon that for its success depends on the physical environment and a wide range of natural resources. It has a significant impact on natural resources and the environment, but when managed well it can also contribute to the conservation of these same resources.

Goal of the trajectory

To understand tourism’s relation with a wide range of environmental settings, resources and sinks, in both developed and developing contexts, as well as the ways in which these relations are governed;
To critically analyse tourism-resource relations and governance arrangements from various contemporary sociological, geographical and political science perspectives

The relations between tourism and natural resource use may take different forms at different levels. Locally, tourism affects the quality and availability of natural resources for local users. Regionally, tourism provides revenue for nature conservation, but also contributes to water shortages and waste. Globally, tourism exacerbates environmental problems, such as climate change and the so-called plastic soup.

The outcomes of these interactions depend on the effects and effectiveness of governance arrangements involving a range of actors. This trajectory focusses on the dynamic interplay between tourism and natural resources, at related processes of environmental governance, and the contemporary theoretical and methodological approaches that allow us to analyse these dynamics.

Students need to choose two courses out of the following four:

ENP-31006 Governance of Tourism and Natural Resources (P2 AF)
GEO-31306 Tourism and Globalization (P5 MO)
ENP-39806 Marine Governance (P5 AF)
SDC-30806 Political Ecologies of Natural Resource Distribution (P5 AF)

Thesis examples

This trajectory could lead to the following thesis opportunities:

Climate adaptation in tourism development (see e.g. “ The role of weather and sea-ice information in Arctic expedition cruising ”)
The role of biodiversity, human-wildlife conflicts, and nature conservation in tourism development (see e.g. “ A lion for some cows : Policy Arrangements in the Payment for Environmental Services at Mbirikani, Kenya”)
The way tourism contributes to and is affected by flooding or water shortage, the energy transition, ocean plastic waste, or the governance arrangements targeted at environmentally sustainable tourism.

UN Tourism | Bringing the world closer

Biodiversity

ECOTOURISM AND PROTECTED AREAS

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Ecotourism and Protected areas

According to the UN Tourism's definition, ecotourism refers to forms of tourism which have the following characteristics:

All nature-based forms of tourism in which the main motivation of the tourists is the observation and appreciation of nature as well as the traditional cultures prevailing in natural areas.
It contains educational and interpretation features.
It is generally, but not exclusively organised by specialised tour operators for small groups. Service provider partners at the destinations tend to be small, locally owned businesses.
It minimises negative impacts upon the natural and socio-cultural environment.
Generating economic benefits for host communities, organisations and authorities managing natural areas with conservation purposes;
Providing alternative employment and income opportunities for local communities;
Increasing awareness towards the conservation of natural and cultural assets, both among locals and tourists.

Source: The British Ecotourism Market, UNWTO 2002

UN Tourism has been involved in the field of ecotourism since the early 1990s and developed a set of guidelines focusing on the strong link between protected area and tourism, with the aim of ensuring that tourism contributes to the purposes of protected areas and does not undermine them.

In the framework of the UN-declared International Year of Ecotourism (IYE) 2002, UN Tourism undertook a wide range of activities, including the organization of regional conferences and the World Ecotourism Summit , and published guidelines and methodologies for ecotourism development and market studies, as well as supported regional and national activities.

At the request of the United Nations General Assembly, the UN Tourism prepared a report on the activities undertaken by States and major international organizations in the framework of the International Year of Ecotourism . Also UN Tourism prepared a series of market reports to increase the knowledge of seven important countries considered “Ecotourism generating markets”.

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Tourism impacts on small island ecosystems: public perceptions from Karimunjawa Island, Indonesia

Kevin muhamad lukman.

1 LAMINA, Yayasan Lamun, 16422 Depok, Indonesia

Yuta Uchiyama

2 Graduate School of Human Development and Environment, Kobe University, Kobe, Japan

Jay Mar D. Quevedo

3 Graduate School of Agricultural and Life Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

Ryo Kohsaka

Associated data.

In Indonesia, tourism has become a promising major economic sector, particularly because of its contributions toward developing the economy and creating employment opportunities for local communities with rich coastal ecosystems. However, the balance between the environmental, social, and economic realms has come into question, as unsustainable tourism practices continue to be promoted in Indonesia. To address such challenges, it is important to identify tourism impacts and provide sustainable policies and plans. Communities often record tourism impacts through their perceptions and act as important stakeholders in the process of sustainable tourism development. We examined tourism impacts on coastal ecosystems in Karimunjawa from the perspective of local communities. More comprehensively, we investigated their perceptions from three perspectives: socio-cultural, economic, and environmental. The study results revealed that the respondents held positive perceptions about tourism’s impact on socio-cultural and economic sectors and negative perceptions about its impact in the environmental domain. A chi-square test and Spearman’s correlation analysis indicated that the respondents’ educational attainment and tourism involvement influenced their perceptions on these issues. The current study results could be used as a baseline reference for contextualizing sustainable tourism plans regarding small island ecosystems in Indonesia.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11852-022-00852-9.

Introduction

Indonesia is considered an attractive destination by tourists worldwide, and the tourism sector has contributed to overall GDP increase (Ahmad et al. 2019 ). In Indonesia, tourism development has been designed to reduce poverty and conserve the environment and natural resources (Sutawa, 2012 ). However, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), in certain tourist destinations, the country’s tourism sector is potentially growing too rapidly without due consideration of sustainability issues (Ollivaud and Haxton 2019 ). For instance, the large influx of tourists to tropical coastal areas can affect economic and ecological resources, which, in turn, can affect coastal ecosystems through land conversion and waste generation activities (Nelson et al. 2019 ). The situation will be exacerbated unless there is some intervention—for example, proper management of tourism activities that create societal issues and cause environmental degradation (Pascoe et al. 2014 ). Therefore, Indonesia’s government has introduced various special programs to promote sustainable tourism in coastal areas. At the provincial level, spatial plans have been introduced to regulate the use of coastal resources (i.e., mangrove ecosystems); for example, these regulate the utilization of such resources for tourism and educational activities and a list of prohibited activities (Lukman et al. 2019 ). Other examples of tourism-related management initiatives in the country include strict regulation of waste management through proper waste segregation processes (Ahmad et al. 2019 ), the establishment of marine protected areas (MPAs) as part of marine conservation policy (Bottema and Bush 2012 ), community-based tourism development (Ernawati et al. 2018 ), introduction of entry fees in marine parks (Pascoe et al. 2014 ), and community empowerment initiatives (Sutawa 2012 ).

In academic literature on sustainable tourism, one major contested issue concerns the empowerment of local communities. Community empowerment encompasses the psychological, social, and political spheres, which directly and significantly affect local communities’ perceptions of tourism (Boley et. 2014 ). According to Ahmad et al. ( 2019 ), governments should engage local communities in tourism promotion and environmental protection practices. Sutawa ( 2012 ) suggested that all stakeholders, including governments, non-government organizations (NGOs), and communities, should function as integral parts of sustainable tourism development and be involved in environmental degradation prevention processes. For instance, community involvement in the Bunaken National Marine Park, Indonesia, is highlighted as a key initiative for mitigating the impact of waste on the ocean (Tallei et al. 2013 ). Meanwhile, on Bali Island, the community’s engagement was identified as being vital for sustainable tourism development (Sutawa 2012 ); for example, the Pemuteran communities, which locally managed a coral reef restoration project, have received many international environmental and ecotourism awards (Trialfhianty and Suadi 2017 ). Thus, by involving residents in planning processes related to tourism development, governments can better reflect their concerns, which, in turn, could minimize any potential negative impacts (Jani 2018 ).

Successful tourism development tends to reflect local residents’ perceptions, and it is built on mutual relationships that are grounded in respect and cooperation between the tourism authorities and local communities (Change et al. 2018 ). Residents often strongly support tourism development when it positively affects the environment (Demirovic et al. 2018 ). A South African study showed that local communities’ perceptions of protected areas were important determinants for successful conservation efforts; that is, these perceptions affected people’s attitudes and behavior toward conservation (Ntuli et al. 2019 ). Another study reported that residents who were well-informed and involved themselves in tourism held more positive perceptions about it, while those who were less informed and less involved held negative perceptions of tourism activities (Lopes et al. 2019 ). However, several factors can influence residents’ perceptions of tourism impacts. For instance, tourism-related benefits could affect residents’ perceptions, so residents who have benefited from tourism may hold more positive perceptions, while those who have not benefited may hold negative perceptions (Brankov et al. 2019 ; Alves et al. 2013 ). One case study from Bohol Island in the Philippines showed that, regardless of any negative effects on the environment, community members welcomed tourism activities because of their expected benefits (e.g., alternative livelihoods) (Gier et al. 2017 ). The social exchange theory (SET) assumes that, in accordance with social behavior in an exchange process where people weigh the potential benefits and costs of any exercise, residents who feel that an “exchange” of tourism development for accompanying advantages will promote their prosperity will have positive reactions and support tourism development (Brankov et al. 2019 ; Ntuli et al. 2019 ). Community perception per se is defined as a function of the benefits and costs associated with tourism development, and when benefits outweigh costs, residents are more inclined to support development (e.g., Quevedo et al. 2021c ).

This study investigated local residents’ perceptions of tourism impacts on coastal ecosystems in Karimunjawa, Indonesia; these perceptions can be divided into three dimensions with regard to sustainability: socio-cultural, economic, and environmental (Li et al. 2019 ; Demirovic et al. 2018 ; Almeida-Garcia et al. 2016 ). We primarily examined their perceptions and analyzed various variables that influenced their perceptions, including their involvement in the tourism industry and their priorities with regard to coastal ecosystem management. We noted that different socio-economic indicators could affect residents’ perceptions about tourism and attempted to develop more universal theories about tourism perception is needed (Demirovic et al. 2018 ; Brankov et al. 2019 ); furthermore, we analyzed research from various countries to identify differences and similarities, in terms of the influencing indicators for tourism-related perceptions, in order to draw contextualized policy implications. Furthermore, this study attempted to provide empirical evidence of public perceptions about tourism impacts on small island ecosystems and examine how this information could be used to implement better policies and environmental management processes.

Materials and Methodology

Study site: karimunjawa.

This study focused on assessing local residents’ perceptions regarding tourism impacts within Karimunjawa Island. Karimunjawa Island, a part of the Karimunjawa National Park (KNP), is covered by 1,285.5 hectares of tropical rainforest ecosystems (BTNKJ 2016 ); furthermore, it is home to diverse coastal ecosystems, and coral reef ecosystems form a major tourist attraction (BTNKJ 2014 ). Based on the 2019 report from Indonesia Statistics, Karimunjawa has a total population density of 4,946 of which 55% belonged to 20–59 age group, followed by 33% for 0–19 age group, and lastly 11% for 60 years old and above category (BPS Kabupaten Jepara 2020 ). Because of its accessibility, KNP holds huge potential in terms of the tourism industry (i.e., the presence of ports and airports). Tourists can also enjoy several attractions within the island including mangrove ecosystems and the area’s surrounding beaches. Based on the report from Central Java province government, the number of foreign tourists visiting Karimunjawa in 2017 is 6,917, while the domestic tourists number is 109,159 (Alamsyah 2017 ). According to Statistics Indonesia in 2019, the number of tourists visiting KNP reached 129,679, an increase of 12.7% compared to 2018; this increased the social and economic interactions between tourists and local people (Putro et al. 2020 ). The increasing numbers of tourists in Karimunjawa followed an increase in convenient transportation, although this area still lacks public infrastructure services (Kautsary 2017 ). With growing tourism industry, new employment and alternative livelihood opportunities will arise for the local communities. For instance, locals can work as a tour guide for snorkeling with a minimum income of Rp. 150,000/day, for diving with Rp. 250,000/day, and in other tourism-related services such as the hotel and transportation business (Qodriyatun 2018 ). Several studies have identified various environmental challenges in Karimunjawa. For instance, Karimunjawa has experienced several adverse impacts including damage to coral reefs through overfishing and destructive fishing, climate change, and declining water quality that is associated with tourism and mariculture (Kennedy et al. 2020 ). From the perspective of carrying capacity analysis for the clean water in Karimunjawa however, a study was conducted which highlights that the island still capable to provide clean water supply (Santoso et al. 2020 ). The rise of the tourism sector in Karimunjawa also led to an increase in CO 2 emissions because of the use of private cars, ferries, and tour buses (Susanty and Saptadi 2020 ). Despite this growth in the local tourism industry, the poverty rate in Karimunjawa is 32%, and traditional farmers and fishers continue to live in extremely poor conditions (Setiawan et al. 2017 ).

Survey questionnaire

This study investigated local residents’ perceptions through face-to-face interview and a 3-part questionnaire applying a random sampling approach (adopted from Quevedo et al. 2020a , b ) in several places which are covering main residential areas of the island to collect a representative response from overall people living in Karimunjawa. The survey sampling was supported by local university students. The first section of the questionnaire collected respondents’ personal information (henceforth, “profiles”), including age, gender, occupation, and education (modified from Lukman et al. 2020 ; Quevedo et al. 2020a ). In the second section, respondents were asked to answer items about their perceptions regarding which coastal management activities should be prioritized. Seven activity types were listed in the questionnaire, and a comments section was provided for listing respondents’ additional management activities (if any), which may not have been included in the questionnaire. The seven activity types adopted by Quevedo et al. ( 2021a ) were (1) organization strengthening and capacity development; (2) coastal and fisheries law enforcement; (3) fisheries management; (4) enterprise, livelihood, and tourism development; (5) information and education campaigns; (6) coastal zoning; and (7) habitat management and marine sanctuaries. Respondents were asked to rank these seven activities from the most prioritized (score 1) to the least prioritized (score 7).

The concept of highlighting these seven activities was based on Law No. 27/2007 on the Management of Coastal and Small Islands. Article 41 emphasizes organization and capacity development with regard to stakeholders as maritime partners in coastal management. The law enforcement mentioned in Article 36 highlights the need for monitoring the implementation of coastal ecosystem management in order to guarantee effective law enforcement in coastal and small island areas, where local communities can participate in such monitoring and enforcement. Article 23 describes the utilization of small Island ecosystems for the fisheries and tourism sectors; this highlights that such utilization should be integrated with ecological and economic perspectives. Article 47 explains the role of the government in establishing educational and training activities for developing human resources. Article 10 describes coastal zonation and details the Zonation Plan for Coastal and Small Islands Areas (RZWP3K) as an instrument for spatial planning. Article 28 provides aspects of habitat management and explains the necessity of conservation activities for protecting biodiversity, fish migration, marine organisms, and cultural sites in coastal and small islands. Figure 1 provides a summary version of Indonesia Law No. 27, 2007.

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Questionnaire Points: Indonesia Law No. 27 and Article of Management

The third section recorded residents’ perceptions regarding tourism impacts. These impacts are divided into three broad categories: socio-cultural, economic, and environmental. According to the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), sustainable tourism should encourage optimal use of environmental resources, respect socio-cultural aspects of communities, and promote viable and long-term economic operations (Ernawati et al. 2018 ). Each category contained five to eight questions (adopted from Quevedo et al. 2021c ). To record perceptions regarding tourism’s impact on socio-cultural aspects, we incorporated these six items: (1) variety of retail options ; (2) options for shops and restaurants ; (3) the number of recreational facilities and amenities in the area ; (4) community strength and unitedness ; (5) interaction with tourists ; and (6) activity options in the town . To record perceptions regarding tourism’s impact on the economy, we listed these five items: (1) government investments in the area ; (2) availability of jobs ; (3) prices of goods and services in the area ; (4) job competition between locals and outsiders ; and (5) the number of available businesses . Last, to assess tourism impacts on the environment, we included these eight items: (1) availability and stocks of fish, shellfish, and other seafoods ; (2) the condition of domestic waste management ; (3) conditions of sewage systems ; (4) conditions of beaches ; (5) conditions of coral reefs ; (6) conditions of seagrass ecosystems ; (7) conditions of mangrove ecosystems ; and (8) availability of fresh water . This section (“‘tourism impacts on the environment”) utilizes a Likert scale (range: −2 to 2; −2 = very negative impact , − 1 = negative impact , 0 = no impact , 1 = positive impact , and 2 = very positive impact ). Furthermore, we asked respondents whether they were working in the tourism sector. The interview respondents were selected randomly, and the questionnaire survey utilized the native language Bahasa .

Statistical analysis and process

This study utilized descriptive statistics; correlations were used for analyzing information collected from the questionnaires. Descriptive statistics are used for summarizing data in an organized manner; relationships between variables in a sample or population are described, where they process condensed data into a simpler summary (Kaur et al. 2018 ). Descriptive statistics were used for visualizing the results from analysis of respondents’ socio-demographic profiles and the perception of tourism impacts on socio-cultural, economic, and environmental dimensions using mean ( M ) values to illustrate the perception of each item within the three categories. Cronbach’s alpha ( α ) is an important statistical concept for questionnaire evaluation, and it is commonly used for demonstrating that constructed tests and scales are fit for the desired research purpose (Tavakol and Dennick 2011 ; Taber 2017 ). Prior to the analysis, we used Cronbach’s alpha to calculate the internal reliability of the three categories (socio-cultural, economic, and environmental). The chi-square test is a statistical test for assessing whether two variables are associated with each other (Ugoni and Walker 1995 ; Rana and Singhal 2015 ). The chi-square test was used for evaluating whether the prioritization of coastal management and involvement in tourism sector-related occupations could be associated with local residents’ perceptions of tourism impacts. This test can also be used for analyzing perceptions regarding socio-cultural and economic factors, while the environmental perception test was separated (in terms of chi-square test analysis, which was performed for each item in the environmental category) to understand each item in the environmental category. The categories related to perception and prioritization were divided into two categories by calculating the average scores for the perception and priority scores. Then, the respondents were divided into two categories based on higher or lower scores for each perception and priority, while for tourism involvement, this category was simply divided into people who were involved in tourism and people who were not involved. We also performed a Spearman’s rank correlation analysis to analyze the association between perception of tourism impact and socio-demographic profiles. This analysis has been used previously in the context of a blue carbon ecosystem study to evaluate the relationships between awareness of benefits and the frequency of accessing the ecosystem (Quevedo et al. 2020a ; Quevedo et al. 2021d ). In this study, the socio-demographic profile was used for analyzing associations between tourism impact perceptions, education levels, and duration of stay in Karimunjawa.

Respondents’ socio-demographic profiles

The interview involved 47 respondents. The study data were collected through face-to-face interviews with in-depth interactions; each interview, which utilized a questionnaire translated into Bahasa, had a duration of 40 to 60 min. The sample size of 47 was large enough for the chi-square test to be applied validly, which requires a minimum sample size that varies from 20 to 50 and has no expected cut-off (Rana and Singhal 2015 ). Table 1 summarizes the respondents’ sociodemographic characteristics. Most (51.06%) respondents had ages ranging between 41 and 50 years, followed by 31–40 years (29.79%), 20–30 years (12.77%), and 51–60 years (6.38%). In terms of gender, the majority of respondents were male (87.23%). The respondents’ education levels showed considerable variation across four categories: elementary school (23.4%), junior high (46.81%), senior high (19.15%), and college (10.63%). Furthermore, after asking the respondents about the duration of their stay in Karimunjawa (from the shortest to the longest), we found that respondents had been staying on the island for 1–5 years (4.26%), 6–10 years (6.38%), 11–15 years (8.51%), 16–20 years (23.4%), and more than 20 years (57.45%).

Percentage distribution for the respondents’ sociodemographic profiles

Perceptions regarding tourism impact

We first analyzed overall perceptions regarding the socio-cultural category (see Table 2 ). Respondents’ overall perception regarding socio-cultural impact was positive ( M = 1.07, α = 0.85). An in-depth examination of each item within the socio-cultural context showed that variety of retail options was perceived positively ( M = 0.85) along with other items including options for shops and restaurants ( M = 1.04), the number of recreational facilities and amenities in the area ( M = 1.04), community strength and unitedness ( M = 1.25), interaction with tourists ( M = 1.02), and activity options in the town ( M = 1.21). Based on the percentage of the respondents, the item for activity options in the town received the highest number of positive responses, with 89.36% of respondents perceiving this item to be positively affected by tourism. Contrastingly, the item for variety of retail options had the highest number of respondents who perceived it in a negative manner, with respondents perceiving that this item would be negatively affected by the tourism sector—14.89% of them gave it negative scores.

The perception profile of the respondents: the socio-cultural category

Respondents from Karimunjawa also perceived the second category, tourism’s impact on economic aspects, positively ( M = 1.18, α = 0.63), which is slightly higher than the socio-economic category; however, this had a lower level of reliability. We also observed each individual item in this category (see Table 3 ) ; government investments in the area was perceived positively ( M = 1.06), and availability of jobs had received the highest average scores in the whole category ( M = 1.44). The rest of the items ( prices of goods and services in the area [ M = 1.31], job competition between locals and outsiders [ M = 0.78], and number of businesses available [ M = 1.27]) were also perceived positively. Looking at the percentage of the respondents who perceived each item positively, the items availability of jobs , prices of goods and services in the area , and number of businesses available had the three highest values; 87.23%, 91.49%, and 93.62% of respondents, respectively, assigned them positive scores. Meanwhile, the item job competition between locals and outsiders received the highest negative score in the economic category; 6.38% of respondents perceived tourism as having a negative impact on job competition.

The perception profile of the respondents: economic category

Regarding the environmental category, the results contrasted with those of the socio-cultural and economic categories. The respondents perceived tourism as having a negative impact on the environment ( M = − 0.04, α = 0.84). Although the overall score was relatively close to indicating “neutrality/no impact,” an examination of individual items showed that a few environmental aspects were perceived to be negatively affected by tourism (Table 4 ). The items that received negative scores were availability and stocks of fish, shellfish, and other seafoods ( M = − 0.21), the condition of domestic waste management ( M = − 0.06), conditions of sewage systems ( M = − 0.17), conditions of coral reefs ( M = − 0.17), and availability of fresh water ( M = − 0.23), while the items conditions of beaches ( M = 0.319), conditions of seagrass ecosystems ( M = 0.08), and conditions of mangrove ecosystems ( M = 0.08) were perceived in a relatively positive manner. Looking at the percentages of respondents who assigned positive and negative scores, we captured several different results for each item. Regarding the item the condition of domestic waste management and conditions of sewage systems , the respondents’ perceptions were almost equally divided between those who perceived the items to be positively affected (44.68% and 45.65%, respectively), and those who perceived them to be negatively affected (46.81% and 45.65%, respectively). Some items received negative scores from most of the respondents—namely, conditions of coral reefs (44.68%) and availability of fresh water (40.43%). Interestingly, availability and stocks of fish, shellfish, and other seafoods was the item where the highest percentage of respondents perceived that tourism would not have a significant impact; 48.94% of the respondents assigned it with a score of 0.

The perception profile of the respondents: environmental category

Correlations among the studied parameters

Regarding the 47 respondents’ assigned scores, the average score for management priority in Karimunjawa was 4.57 ( M ); 22 respondents assigned lower management scores (priority for tourism management), and the other 25 respondents assigned higher management scores (priority for other types of coastal management). Based on the chi-square test regarding the average scores for socio-cultural perception and economic perception, neither result was statistically significant; both had p -values higher than 0.05 (socio-cultural and economic). An examination of the results of the chi-square test using the category of involvement in the tourism sector showed that a smaller number of samples could be used in this test; 20 respondents were not involved in the tourism sector, and 19 respondents were involved in the tourism sector. Eight respondents who did not give answers regarding their involvement in the tourism sector were excluded from this test. The chi-square test results involving socio-cultural perception showed a statistically significant result ( p < 0.01); people who were involved in the tourism sector showed a more positive perception of the impact of tourism on the socio-cultural category. However, regarding economic perception, the chi-square test yielded a statistically insignificant result ( p > 0.05). Table 5 shows the chi-square test ( p -value) results for the socio-cultural and economic categories.

The perception profile of the respondents: Socio-cultural and economic categories

* Indicates a significant correlation at p -value < 0.01

The chi-square test for environmental perception, which focused on each item, and the association of environmental perception with management priority showed one result that was statistically significant ( p < 0.05)—that is, for the conditions of seagrass ecosystems . The results showed that respondents with higher management scores (a priority for coastal management activities besides tourism) had a lower negative perception of conditions of seagrass ecosystems , which can be interpreted to mean that these respondents perceived tourism as having a negative impact on the conditions of the seagrass ecosystems. The other environmental perception items regarding management priority did not show any statistically significant results. Viewing the perspective of involvement in tourism with regard to environmental perception, two items provided statistically significant results: conditions of seagrass ecosystems ( p < 0.05) and conditions of mangrove ecosystems ( p < 0.05). Regarding these items, respondents involved in the tourism sector had a lower perception—that is, they perceived tourism as having a negative impact on the seagrass and mangrove ecosystems. The other five items within the environmental category did not produce statistically significant results. Table 6 presents the results of the chi-square test ( p -value) for the environmental category.

* Indicates a significant correlation at p -value < 0.05

The Spearman correlation analysis of socio-demographic profiles with regard to the three perception categories (socio-cultural, economic, and environmental) showed statistically significant results for socio-demographic aspects related to education level (see Table 7 ) . The observed effect of education level negatively influenced the perception of tourism’s impact on the environment ( ρ = −0.397, p < 0.01). However, there were no statistically significant results for the influence of education level on socio-cultural and economic perceptions or for the influence of duration of stay in Karimunjawa on the three perception categories.

Spearman rank correlation analysis for the socio-demographic profile with the perception category

Discussions

Locals’ perceptions of tourism impacts.

In this paper, we first discussed the three domains: socio-cultural, economic, and environmental. The interactions of these three domains with other indicators (e.g., tourism involvement, management priority, and so on) are discussed at the end of sub-Sect. 4.2. In Karimunjawa, local residents’ overall tourism impact-related perceptions were positive for the socio-cultural and economic realms. In short, this study confirmed certain trends that emerged in existing studies—for example, tourism was generally perceived to have a positive impact on socio-economic dimensions but unfavorably with regard to the environment, as was the case in Ubud, Indonesia (Ernawati et al. 2018 ). Other positive effects from existing studies were also confirmed in the Karimunjawa case—for example, tourism was perceived to indicate economic development, cultural protection, and infrastructure improvement, as was the case in China (cf. Li et al. 2019 ).

Socio-cultural domain

Regarding socio-cultural impact, several items, especially interaction with tourists, were perceived positively by local residents in Karimunjawa. This strong positive perception of tourists indicated the absence of any xenophobic feelings toward tourists from the local population (Brankov et al. 2019 ). Instead, the local residents were interested in participating in tourism-related activities (Setiawan et al. 2017 ). We argue that this positive perception expressed by the residents was related to the positive situation of tourism in Karimunjawa; the locals perceived tourism to be mostly beneficial. Through the off-the-record points, which we did not include in the questionnaire but discussed with locals, we also captured how they were eager to communicate, especially with foreign tourists, in the hope of learning and exercising a new language. Perceptions regarding tourist behaviors can have a positive influence on locals’ attitudes and behaviors; more positive perceptions of tourists’ respectful behavior could result in a greater overall positive perception (Vargas-Sanchez et al. 2011 ).

The second point concerned local residents’ high positive perception of tourism impacts on community strength and unity. We argue that locals linked tourism to community initiatives on the island. Past research has identified community empowerment as a key factor for tourism development; it can help to reduce tourism’s negative impacts, thus leading to the development of a more sustainable tourism (Sutawa 2012 ). However, there are some concerns about the potential conflict, in terms of authority and power sharing, between various stakeholders and the community; thus, the government and community in Karimunjawa need to stay well informed about locals’ perceptions about tourism development in order to achieve cooperative development. A study from Wibowo et al. ( 2018 ) on community participation in Karimunjawa reported that community knowledge and obedience to rules of area zonation was widespread from the fishermen community who already had the knowledge and understanding, although the overall local residents’ participation in coastal ecosystem management was low to medium which showed that there were many who didn’t have enough knowledge of Karimunjawa zonation system.

Economic domain

The second perception category, tourism’s impact on the economic sector, was also perceived positively. The tourism sector has the potential to yield foreign exchange, attract international investments, increase tax revenues, and create new opportunities for employment (Setiawan et al. 2017 ). Tourism activities that do not result in rapid infrastructure development could positively influence perceptions of tourism and its future development because of currently limited employment opportunities in this region (Brankov et al. 2019 ). Employment opportunities form a major reason for locals’ positive perception of tourism impacts. During the pre-COVID-19 period, tourism was a thriving industry in Karimunjawa until 2019 (Setiawan et al. 2017 ). The benefits received from the tourism sector and the thriving tourism industry might have shaped residents’ positive tourism-related perceptions, as they might have expected the same benefits or possibly better outcomes to accrue in the long-term. Residents’ positive attitudes could be connected to the belief that tourism creates new jobs for the local population and fosters the development of the local culture and community (Brankov et al. 2019 ).

Environment

The perception of tourism’s impact on the environment was the only category where locals perceive tourism impacts in a negative manner. The first concern was tourism’s negative impact on fisheries and seafood stocks. There are seven zones within the KNP, one of which is the utilization zone where fishers operate; however, their catch has decreased due to their use of destructive technology (Simbolon et al. 2016 ). “No-take” areas (for example, inside tourism zones) have been introduced with the aim of improving fisheries; these areas are unlikely to impact the fishers (e.g., in terms of possible displacement from “no-take” areas). However, there could be displacement of fishing efforts from areas that received greater enforcement (e.g., inside tourism zones). In Karimunjawa, there has been weak compliance with “no-take” areas regulations and a lack of targeted fishing gear controls; this may have promoted competition and conflict among the fishers (Campbell et al. 2014 ).

In KNP, zonation was legislated in 1989 by the authorities with negligible stakeholder input (Campbell et al. 2012 ). According to the document of Strategic Plan KNP period 2020–2024, the issues of (1) mangrove illegal logging, (2) conflict of community with wild animals (3) decrease coverage of coral reefs, and (4) tourism development were stated (BTNKJ 2020 ), in which the document formulated several strategies from various sector to coordinate and achieve the KNP goals of conservation managements. Later a set of zones incorporating community and stakeholder knowledge, which included “no-take” core and protection zones, “traditional” fishing utilization zones, and zones that permitted specific activities, such as tourism zones, rehabilitation zones, and mariculture zones, were introduced. In KNP, tourism activities are permitted in the tourism, rehabilitation, aquaculture, and utilization zones, while fishing activities are only allowed in the rehabilitation and utilization zones (Yulianto et al. 2015 ). We argue that the overlap—that is, tourists being allowed to access the utilization and rehabilitation zones—could have influenced the fishing community’s concerns about negative tourism impacts, resulting in their overall negative perceptions of tourism. However, pressures on fisheries may also originate in some other sectors aside from tourism. Overfishing is a concern in KNP, and various potential threat activities have been identified, including legal fishing, illegal fishing, coastal development (including tourism), seaweed mariculture, grouper aquaculture, and climate change; these concerns should be addressed in order to achieve desired outcomes for fisheries intervention (Battista et al. 2017 ).

The condition of waste and sewerage management in Karimunjawa is another item that received negative perceptions. There seem to be no straightforward solutions for waste management on small islands because of various issues including limited space, restricted recycling, dense population, and dependence on tourism (Camilleri-Fenech et al. 2018 ). We argue that the issue of waste management in Karimunjawa also played a relevant role in shaping local residents’ perceptions regarding tourism impacts. These concerns and challenges should not be simply attributed to tourists’ bad behaviors, as the issue of Island waste management includes various aspects of limited land resources, high energy, costs, large seasonal fluctuation in waste volumes, and complex social and political dynamics (Eckelman et al. 2014 ).

The off-the-record interview discussions with the locals captured their concerns about the waste management system in Karimunjawa in terms of waste collection and disposal sites. According to recent news from August 2020, a newly established facility for recycling waste went into operation in Karimunjawa with financial support from the Ministry of Environment and Forestry of Indonesia. The facility is expected to store 10 tons of waste per day and reduce the plastic waste that leaks to the ocean by 75% (Cahyana 2020 ). Another source (Erje 2020 ) raised the concern that domestic waste is generated by locals and the tourism activity within the Karimunjawa area, with a total daily waste production reaching 5.6 tons. A robust waste management system is thus critical for both tourism and local environments in terms of supporting infrastructures in the area. Furthermore, various waste reduction initiatives should also be considered—for example, involving the community and tourists in relevant environmental conservation campaigns. This situation presents some opportunities for implementing island waste management strategies (for example, from small businesses for niche recycling and manufacturing markets (Eckelman et al. 2014 ), or through composting organic waste, which can ultimately reduce 60% of municipal solid waste (Mohee et al. 2015 ).

The next discussion point in this regard is the diverse ecosystems in Karimunjawa, which hold potential benefits for the tourism sector. Field observation has shown that one common business objective of the tourism sector in Karimunjawa is developing tourist resort businesses; this utilizes the beautiful scenery of nearby coastal ecosystems. Most experts agree that an increasing number of potential pressures have been caused by tourism activities in Karimunjawa (Prasetya et al. 2018 ). This notion is also evident in locals’ perception of tourism impacts on the coral reef ecosystem; this has resulted in their negative perceptions of tourism. Coastal tourist areas are often centered around fragile ecosystems, including coral reefs (Nelson et al. 2019 ). The status quo of pressures on coral reefs and Karimunjawa’s reliance on tourism related to the coral reef ecosystems have made enforcing legal regulations for protecting coral reef ecosystems vital. Based on a study from Akhmad et al. ( 2018 ), it was reported that the increase of snorkeling tourists in Karimunjawa can cause ecological pressure on coral reefs at snorkeling sites, with the damage of the coral reefs in partial form such as eroded surface. At the same time, snorkeling in Karimunjawa holds potential economic value of 94,549,044 IDR/year, with the tourism demand is indirectly related to the condition of the quantity and quality of the coral reef (Mazaya et al. 2019 ).

Water availability formed the last source of locals’ tourism-related negative perceptions in the environmental category. Large tourist influxes can increase pressures on energy and water needs (Nelson et al., 2019 ). After the interview, we received several comments from the respondents, voicing their concerns about the water supply in Karimunjawa, especially during the drought season when they needed to buy water at higher prices; on some occasions, there was not enough water for consumption. Hotel construction requires adequate communal infrastructure, including drinking water provision and water treatment plants (Demirovic et al. 2018 ).

Overall, based on our findings of negative environmental perceptions, we argue the importance of addressing environmental pressures in Karimunjawa. A study on the Pärnu Bay region, where strict coastal protection measures are considered to be too expensive and not reasonable in terms of implementation, recommended the development of alternative adaptation measures and raising awareness as applicable response options (Tõnisson et al. 2019 ). We argue that, in the Karimunjawa case, it is important to make efforts to raising awareness of tourism and the environment. Residents who perceive tourism as having positive effects on the environment will generate stronger support for tourism development (Demirovic et al. 2018 ). However, in Karimunjawa, the contribution of tourists should also be considered important. Tourists can contribute toward improving the environment by adopting pro-environment attitudes and proper behaviors (Stefanica and Butnaru 2015 ). Despite the overall negative perception observed in this study, there is the notion to utilize the marine resources, such as coral reef, as an alternative livelihood for the locals. Study from Setiawan et al. ( 2017 ) reported that poor households in Karimunjawa are willing to be involved in the tourism sector provided that they are given employment opportunities and ensure an increase in their income. This situation illustrates that there are two perspective sides of the concern from the locals on the negative impact of tourism, but at the same time there is also the need to expand the tourism sector to improve the local economy of Karimunjawa. Future study should consider these trade-offs between economy from tourism and the impact to environment to better understand the local’s perception on their priority. While other ecosystems, including mangroves, seagrass systems, and beaches, can be positively impacted by tourism, initial initiatives should focus on implementing programs for protecting and preserving these ecosystems; this should be followed by implementation of similar initiatives for other threatened ecosystems such as coral reefs. For example, tangible procedures and law enforcement can be implemented to reduce the economic losses related to destruction of coral reefs (Haya and Fujii 2019 ). Furthermore, discussion on the ecosystem services in the boundary of coastal settings need to take place, such as the potential of blue carbon ecosystems services in mangroves and seagrass as marine resources in the utilization for carbon sequestration and tourism activities. Blue carbon ecosystem services of carbon sequestration in the mangrove and seagrass ecosystem in Karimunjawa was reported to be moderately aware by the locals, and in general the blue carbon functions are unrecognized compared with the services as coastal protection (Quevedo et al. 2021a ). In future research, information of emissions from tourism sector and carbon sequestration function of blue carbon ecosystem can be shared with local residents as scientific evidence to support them to evaluate the status of coastal environment.

Interaction effects on perception: Influence of tourism involvement, management priority, and education level on perceptions of tourism impact

Socio-cultural and Economic domains .

Our correlation analysis results showed that locals’ involvement in the tourism sector influences their positive perception of the socio-cultural category but not the economic one. People employed in tourism and their family members often hold more positive opinions about tourism impacts (Brankov et al. 2019 ). In previous studies, residents who were more informed and more involved often held more positive perceptions of tourism; thus, tourism development initiatives must consult with local residents while considering the different needs of the communities (Lopes et al. 2019 ). The people of Karimunjawa Island were eager to interact with tourists in a socio-cultural manner, thus influencing the positive perception toward this category. Regarding the economic category, however, our analysis showed that tourism involvement was not related to their positive perception of tourism’s impact on the economy. We argue that this finding is related to current development levels on Karimunjawa Island. Our survey showed that level of tourism development on Karimunjawa Island was low. Infrastructures such as roads, facilities, and commerce sectors were still deficient and somehow centralized to only one area. While low-to-moderate tourism development is currently perceived as being beneficial, residents’ perceptions in this regard could change to negative as the area develops (Vargas-Sanchez et al. 2011 ). In a similar vein, overall perceptions of economic and socio-cultural categories in Karimunjawa were positive. Meanwhile, our analysis of management priority did not detect any significant relationship with perception. We argue that prioritization of management by itself did not provide any direct benefits to the residents; thus, no direct relationships were observed in this regard.

Environmental .

The locals’ negative perceptions of the impact of tourism on the environment was observed among by those involved in tourism, who indicated a positive relationship with concerns regarding seagrass ecosystems and mangrove ecosystems. In other words, respondents who were involved in the tourism sector perceive tourism as a potential threat to the environment. It should be noted that seagrass systems form a concerning ecosystem in terms of tourism development-related ecological threats in Karimunjawa. One study involving the Karimunjawa Islands, particularly the waters around Menjangan Kecil and Menjangan Besar, showed that between the two study sites, the area with higher seagrass density had higher fish abundance and species numbers (Susilo et al. 2018 ). In Berau, East Kalimantan, Indonesia, the fishing communities reported changes and degradation in the seagrass ecosystems (Lukman et al. 2020 ). We argue that the situation might be similar in Karimunjawa Island because the locals involved in tourism tend to notice the accompanying changes in the seagrass and mangrove ecosystems; simultaneously, they have witnessed the development of tourism, and this has shaped their negative perceptions regarding tourism. Furthermore, exposure to tourists’ negative behaviors with regard to the environment could also shape locals’ negative perceptions of the tourism sector. Initiatives, including social marketing in the tourism industry, to promote pro-environmental behaviors could also contribute toward helping tourists develop more positive environment-related behaviors and attitudes (Tkaczynski et al. 2020 ). Tourism stakeholders must consider regulating tourists’ behaviors within Karimunjawa Island because involvement with locals to protect the beauty of the island’s environment may yield much more desirable results. The approach of synergizing environmental conservation with socio-economic dimension of Karimunjawa can also be considered. For example, in Gili Trawangan case, tourists can show their support on the conservation effort through the implementation of entry/exit fees, voluntary contributions, taxes, and licensing fees (Nelson et al. 2019 ), as well as in the Bunaken National Marine park with user fees being utilized to address environmental and equity issues (Pascoe et al. 2014 ).

Finally, the environmental perception was analyzed using the Spearman-rank analysis results. The duration of stay did not influence perception, while education level showed a negative correlation with perception. This finding may be ascribed to the fact that the deterioration in the environment had proceeded in a gradual manner, and therefore the duration of living years did not influence perception. The locals had gradually become accustomed to situations such as the lower catches in the fisheries sector. In other contexts, living at the site for more than 10 years was reported to be a predictor of negative attitudes toward tourism development; this was the case in one study conducted in Benalmadena, Spain, which argued that, when residents lived in the area for a longer period, they witnessed many negative changes and tended to miss the “good old days” (Almeida-Garcia et al. 2016 ). Regarding the level of education, we found that it negatively influenced the perception of tourism’s impact on the environment; thus, as the education level increases, the perception of tourism’s impact on the environment deteriorates. These results contrasted with those of previous studies. For example, in Spain, the level of education was a strong predictor of positive attitudes toward tourism’s effects; respondents with higher education levels tended to perceive tourism’s impacts more positively (Almeida-Garcia et al. 2016 ). In Argentina, tourism-related positive perceptions were influenced by reaching the secondary level of education; education significantly improved this perception (Castilla et al. 2020 ). In the case of Karimunjawa, education did not necessarily translate into a positive perception of the tourism industry; however, it allowed locals to understand the potential benefits of tourism. Highly educated respondents’ low level of involvement may have affected their lack of positive perceptions of tourism’s impact on the environment. Educated people’s understanding of the current conditions of pressures and threats to the island from various sectors, including tourism, might have shaped their overall negative perception. Relevant stakeholders’ inability to initiate relevant efforts, or perhaps related stakeholders’ lack of involvement in encouraging potential human resources to contribute toward environment conservation may exacerbate this situation. We suggest that official bodies should identify and involve potential human resources, such as teachers and NGO members, in these efforts because they have the potential to generate support from local residents in general. Nonetheless, there is also another context on the difference with the case of Spain and Argentine. In Spain, the residents with lower education levels consider themselves less likely to get a job and benefit from tourism, hence they have more critical view and perceived tourism in negative way and prefer to maintain traditional way of life (Almeida-Garcia et al. 2016 ). For the Argentina case, higher level of education is linked with the condition of the school in the area addressed the topic in science manner for the object of tourism (Castilla et al. 2020 ). School education can provide scientific and standardized knowledge, however, it should be noted that scientific knowledge itself is a tool which can be utilized to evaluate the status of local environment. Future studies should also consider different socio-economic indicators, such as length of stay, that may affect residents’ perception in order to develop more universal theories about tourism perception (Brankov et al. 2019 ), as well as the context from local wisdom and values which can influence the community perception to tourism. Another approach should aim to deepen causal relationships between environmental management factors and impact assessment. This includes analysis based on perspectives of management related drivers, including the drivers, pressures, states, impacts, and responses (DPSIR) model (Kohsaka 2010 ; Quevedo et al. 2021b ), and the accessibility of tourism resources and locals’ perceptions regarding such resources (Uchiyama and Kohsaka 2016 ).

This study investigated a small Island community’s perception of tourism impacts from three perspectives: socio-culture, economics, and environment. We identified that locals in Karimunjawa Island perceived the tourism sector to have a positive impact on the socio-cultural and economic domains but a negative impact on the environmental realm. We traced back the factors that shaped these perceptions by using the dimensions of local tourism sector involvement and management priority; both dimensions helped local residents understand and receive the benefits of the tourism sector. Simultaneously, we also observed how locals tended to notice environmental degradations within the context of tourism development and factors, such as levels of education, that influenced the locals’ understanding of the benefits and threats of the tourism industry.

Our findings could contribute toward understanding the factors that influence tourism impact-related perceptions. However, there are challenges in these methodologies. We suggest that two future research tasks should be conducted with regard to the perceptions and relationships of the variables. Our findings are based largely on face-to-face surveys of locals; this can be further combined with an in-depth analysis of the perceptions of specific actors (perceptions of municipality officials, as in Kohsaka et al. 2019 ) and analysis of policy processes (cf. text analysis of debate in municipality councils; Kohsaka and Matsuoka 2015 ). Although our study did not find any direct insight with regard to length of stay, we recommend further investigation of the intricacies of other related factors including environmental changes or incidents perceived in recent years. Such multi-layered analyses could enrich our understanding regarding various indicators that influence perception and can thus provide better and more comprehensive understandings related to perception studies.

Furthermore, tourism stakeholders’ (such as NGOs and government officials) attitudes and perceptions are necessary for identifying differences and similarities and drawing policy implications (Demirovic et al. 2018 ). This study’s major contribution is to offer a design process for comprehensive coastal ecosystem management that integrates fisheries and tourism; furthermore, it suggested that involving the local community is crucial for helping them access and understand locales with regard to the current status of the island in the context of tourism development. It also explored how the related stakeholders can initiate a movement for environmental conservation; these findings could guide the residents of Karimunjawa in benefiting from the tourism sector but also in preserving their environment.

Electronic Supplementary Material

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers JP16KK0053; JP17K02105; JP20K12398; 21K18456; JST and JICA - SATREPS project “Comprehensive Assessment and Conservation of Blue Carbon Ecosystem and Their Services in the Coral Triangle (Blue CARES)”; JST RISTEX Grant Number JPMJRX20B3; JST Grant Number JPMJPF2110; Asia-Pacific Network for Global Change Research Grant Number CBA2020-05SY-Kohsaka; Kurita Water and Environment Foundation [20C002]; Toyota Foundation (D17-N-0107); and Foundation for Environmental Conservation Measures, Keidanren (2020); Heiwa Nakajima Foundation (2022); Asahi Group Foundation (2022); JSPS KAKENHI Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B), 2022-2025 (Balancing Tourism and Conservation in Era of Climate Change and Shrinkage: Land Use Maps as a Boundary Object).

Declaration of Interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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Number of tourist arrivals

Somewhere on Earth this year

The World Counts • Impact through Awareness

The world counts impact through awareness, 45 arrivals every second.

There are over 1.4 billion tourists arriving at their destination every year. That’s 45 arrivals every single second.

Exponential growth of tourism

In 1950 there were 25 million international tourist arrivals, in 1970 the number was 166 million, and by 1990 it had grown to 435 million. From 1990 to 2018 numbers more than tripled reaching 1.442 billion. By 2030, 1.8 billion tourist arrivals are projected.

Negative environmental impacts of tourism

The negative environmental impacts of tourism are substantial. They include the depletion of local natural resources as well as pollution and waste problems. Tourism often puts pressure on natural resources through over-consumption, often in places where resources are already scarce.

Tourism puts enormous stress on local land use, and can lead to soil erosion, increased pollution, natural habitat loss, and more pressure on endangered species. These effects can gradually destroy the environmental resources on which tourism itself depends.

Tourism often leads to overuse of water

An average golf course in a tropical country, for example, uses as much water as 60,000 rural villagers. It also uses 1500 kilos of chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides per year.

Tourism and climate change

Tourism contributes to more than 5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, with transportation accounting for 90 percent of this.

By 2030, a 25% increase in CO2-emissions from tourism compared to 2016 is expected. From 1,597 million tons to 1,998 million tons.

394,730,543

Tons of waste dumped

Globally, this year

Square kilometers of land area being degraded

793,184,608,700

Tons of freshwater used

Worldwide, this year

8,024,943,431

Tons of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere

The alternative: Eco-tourism

Eco-tourism offers a greener alternative. Eco-tourism is a rapidly growing industry, with potential benefits for both the environment and the economies of the tourist destinations.

Number of eco-tourist arrivals

World Population
The Consumer Economy
Our Global Challenges
The Project
Keep the optimism
Support green companies

Let us take a walk to the sustainable tourism practices: a qualitative study through the lens of tourism experts

Research Article
Published: 04 January 2024
Volume 31 , pages 12892–12915, ( 2024 )

Cite this article

Vikas Arya 1 ,
Vilte Auruskeviciene ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1563-4052 2 ,
Srishti Agarwal 3 ,
Priyanka Kokatnur 3 ,
Harish Kumar 4 &
Rajeev Verma 5

357 Accesses

Explore all metrics

The rising opportunities of sustainable tourism have brought many policies to control the exploitation of the environment and increase the reach of luxurious, safe, and authentic experiences to the different segments of tourists. This study seeks to prioritize the variables influencing the development of sustainable tourism and pinpoint key success factors that align with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It adopts a tri-dimensional framework encompassing economic, social, and environmental aspects, further delineated into eleven sub-dimensions, to provide a quantitative evaluation of sustainable tourism. We conducted interviews with 26 tourism industry experts hailing from eight countries, analyzing their responses using interval type-2 fuzzy sets. The results underscore the critical role of specific components in advancing sustainable tourism. In the economic dimension, “financial resources and tourism costs” emerge as vital factors. In the social dimension, “health and safety” takes center stage, while “green infrastructure” plays a pivotal role in the environmental dimension. These findings underscore the significance of these aspects in promoting sustainable tourism. Furthermore, this study explores the strategic importance of sustainable tourism equity in shaping tourism planning and development for emerging markets.

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Source: Authors

Three pillars of sustainability: in search of conceptual origins

Ben Purvis, Yong Mao & Darren Robinson

Impact of tourism development upon environmental sustainability: a suggested framework for sustainable ecotourism

Qadar Bakhsh Baloch, Syed Naseeb Shah, … Asia Umar Khan

Ecotourism and sustainable development: a scientometric review of global research trends

Lishan Xu, Changlin Ao, … Zhenyu Cai

Data availability

Data will be available on request.

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All authors contributed to the study’s conception and design. Vikas Arya conducted the analysis of data and provided an interpretation of the findings. Vilte Auruskeviciene wrote the manuscript draft and ensured consistency in referencing and citation formatting. Srishti Agarwal collected data, collaborated with Vikas Arya to analyze the data, and contributed to the discussion of the findings. Priyanka Kokatnur contributed to the research methodology development and data collection. Harish Kumar provided insights to the theoretical and managerial aspects of the study and contributed to the discussion section. Rajeev Verma conducted a literature review and collaborated with Vilte Auruskeviciene to integrate the literature review into the manuscript. All authors provided comments on previous versions of the manuscript, and they all read and approved the final manuscript.

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Arya, V., Auruskeviciene, V., Agarwal, S. et al. Let us take a walk to the sustainable tourism practices: a qualitative study through the lens of tourism experts. Environ Sci Pollut Res 31 , 12892–12915 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-023-31503-7

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Article contents

Introduction

Alternative Tourism and Sustainable Development

Community-Based Tourism

Pro-Poor Tourism

Slow Tourism

Impacts of Tourism Development

Economic Impacts of Tourism

Environmental Impacts of Tourism

Social Impacts of Tourism

Sustainability of Tourism

Further Reading

Crisis in our national parks: how tourists are loving nature to death

‘Our species is having the greatest impact’

People, people everywhere

A stinking problem

Nature through a screen

The trouble for towns

Can anything be done?

‘It’s just going to keep growing’

This story was reported and published in collaboration with:

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The Journey Back to Recovery – Resources to Develop Tourism Sustainably

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

The benefits of tourism for rural community development

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Introduction

Literature review

Contributions of rural tourism to rural community development

Methodology

Selection of experts

Generating items to represent the construct

Step 2: Examine the face validity of omitted variables and CMB

Step 3: Examine interexpert consensus for construct-irrelevant variances

Step 4: Examine intergroup consistency

Step 5: Examine interexpert reliability

Step 6: Examine the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process

Face validity

Interexpert consensus

Intergroup consistency and interexpert reliability

The hierarchical framework

Discussion/Implications

Data availability

Author information

Contributions

Corresponding author

Ethics declarations

Ethical approval

Informed consent

Additional information

Rights and permissions

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14 important environmental impacts of tourism + explanations + examples

Why the environment is so important to tourism

Negative environmental impacts of tourism

Depletion of natural resources

Physical impacts of tourism development

Physical impacts from tourist activities

Tourism & Natural Resources

Goal of the trajectory

Thesis examples

UN Tourism | Bringing the world closer

Biodiversity

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Ecotourism and Protected areas

Tourism impacts on small island ecosystems: public perceptions from Karimunjawa Island, Indonesia

Yuta Uchiyama

Jay Mar D. Quevedo

Ryo Kohsaka

Supplementary Information

Introduction

Materials and Methodology

Survey questionnaire

Statistical analysis and process

Respondents’ socio-demographic profiles