Environmental Impacts of Tourism: A Framework for Analysis and Evaluation

Abstract

Tourism grew rapidly during the 1960s and 1970s, but it was soon realized that this growth was not without costs. The social, cultural, economic, and environmental impacts of tourist growth became subjects of serious study. Tourism planning was advocated as a tool for controlling the negative impacts of tourism development and for protecting the very same resources upon which the profitability of the industry depended. However, many tourism development studies and plans were not (and many still are not) based on rigorous quantitative and integrated analysis of the several dimensions of tourism neither did they control for the contribution of other activities besides tourism to observed or expected impacts. The following study focuses on the environmental impacts of tourism and proposes a framework for their analysis and evaluation. The first section reviews briefly the literature on tourism and its environmental impacts and identifies the main methodological issues in their analysis; the second section details the proposed analytical framework and the last section discusses its advantages and limitations. KeywordsEnvironmental ImpactEconomic SectorEconomic ModuleTourism DevelopmentInterface ModuleThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.