Regional sustainability and tourism carrying capacities

Abstract

Discussion on the growth limits and carrying capacity of tourism destinations is not new. Already for decades, carrying capacity has been at the core of sustainable tourism development and aims at offering ‘time/space-specific answers’ for individual localities of various European regions. There are many definitions of this concept and the calculation of a single ‘magic number’ quantifying the carrying capacity is infeasible for reasons such as differences in the thresholds established by visitors and residents, ecological limits, various resources, etc. The discussion about carrying capacity in the context of regional sustainability is linked to human activities impacting a region. This impact has to be within the region's ecological limits and consistent with the region's social and economic constraints in order to ensure adequate supporting functions for the population living in the region. This means that regions should learn as much as possible about the impact of tourism on their destinations in order to develop solid and adequate policies for regional and tourism development. This paper therefore introduces a novel methodology for assessing carrying capacity in tourism destinations, which (a) is specific enough to cater to destination-specific needs, as verified by pilot-testing on various representative case studies, and (b) is general enough to be applicable to any tourism destination throughout European regions. The results emphasize the importance of such a hands-on actionable methodology, while at the same time underlining the importance of dialogue between different stakeholder groups. The value added of the developed methodology is that it simultaneously addresses regional sustainability and tourism development, while acknowledging the fact that there is no single metric or value for carrying capacity. Finally, it is applicable to various types of destinations.