Tourism's Environmental Impact Part I: Research Over the Decades

Greetings and welcome to all the geographers, travellers and curious minds out there!

Following my introductory posts, I'd like to provide you all with an overview of some basic concepts and issues surrounding the environmental impacts of tourism. This shall largely draw upon some admittedly pretty old papers and concepts: Butler,1991; Wong, 2004; Sun and Walsh, 1998; Cohen, 1978 ; Buckley, 2000; and O’Reilly, 1986. However I think the seminal nature of several of these means they'll be a really useful backdrop to the more recent scene of tourism research which we'll delve into later. So without further ado – let’s get stuck in!

Why does tourism have detrimental environmental impacts?

In a perfect world, the tourism's economic benefits would be used to protect the very environment the industry utilises to gain tourists. However in most cases, damage to the natural environment occurs through unsuitable use of natural resources, threatening the very economic viability of the industry (Butler, 1991). This occurs despite the fact many tourists and governments acknowledge the need for protection of the environment – but why?

A basic flaw is that tourism is not naturally a non-consumptive renewable resource industry, with visitors entering and leaving an area with no impact on the resources of that area (Butler, 1991). If tourism goes beyond the capacity of an environment to endure it, as with any other resource use, it becomes a short-lived boom and bust industry (Murphy, 1985).

As such, tourism is essentially cyclical in its development. The suggested tourist development model (Figure 1) follows 2 principles; that of the ‘product-life cycle’, and the ecological concept of ‘carrying capacity’ (Butler, 1991). Regarding the first, a product – in this case tourism – exhibits a stage of slow growth, and if marketed right with the correct facilities, follows into a take-off stage of fast growth with subsequent stability. What is being purchased here is an experience (Butler, 1991). This is where the second principle of carrying capacity comes in. This one is based on animal populations, which naturally experience rapid growth until the population number goes beyond the environment’s capability to sustain it, with subsequent population crashes. It can be argued that tourist hotspots follow a similar course. Environmental capacity in this case may be reflected in features such as water and land resources, and the capability of plants and animals to withstand disturbance (Butler, 1991). The definition of carrying capacity within a tourist context varies greatly, but for the purposes of this model I think the most appropriate definition is a biophysical one proposed by Mathieson and Wall, 1982: 21. Here, carrying capacity is defined as the maximum tourist numbers able to visit a site whilst avoiding a significant change in the natural environment and the visitors’ quality of experience.

Ultimately the model proposes that destinations will be deemed less attractive to visit with increasing degradation of the environment – a period of decline. After this, the tourist destination may return to its original purpose, or find alternative purposes such as a retirement community – the rejuvenation period (Butler, 1991).

Figure 1. Tourist-area cycle of evolution, based on Butler, 1980. Source: Butler, 1991.

Both principles suggest an inevitable overstretching of the environmental capacity – the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ (Hardin, 1968) - in a tourist context that is. This concept helps to explain exactly why tourist development more often than not leads to environmental degradation. Most resources for tourism are ‘common’ goods – the natural landscape, for example. These are inevitably destroyed due to the fact that each individual stands to benefit - in the short term at least - by purposefully exceeding the limits or capacity of that resource (Butler, 1991). This leads to growth of tourism characterised by strong competition to gain a share of the expanding market with little thought given to the implications, including that on the natural environment.

Categorising Tourism's Environmental Impacts

Figure 2 identifies some basic environmental impacts of tourism:

Figure 2. A summary of the detrimental environmental impacts of tourism, adapted from Genot, 1997; Wong, 2002. Source: Wong, 2004.

Tourism’s environmental impacts cover pretty much all parts of the natural environment. They vary from comparatively obvious effects such as sewage wastewater discharges, to impacts that are much more subtle and more difficult to detect, such as modifications in plant pollination (Buckley, 2000). However, these more subtle ones are often more critical for conservation than the more obvious impacts. Let’s have a look at a subtle impact from Figure 2 in more depth: soil erosion. Although not exactly what would first spring to mind when thinking about polluting tourists, soil erosion can lead to changes in plant communities and regeneration, cause particulate pollution, cause changes in stream turbulence and current speed and alter surface water infiltration (Buckley, 2000).

Tourism’s environmental impacts exhibit distinctive geographical patterns (Mieczkowski, 1995). Globally, the main areas focus in Western Europe, with The Mediterranean being the most overdeveloped region worldwide in terms of tourism (Wong, 2004). However, there are spatial discontinuities in the impacts; although the majority of tourist activity is extremely localised, the impacts can be experienced across long distances, as with air pollution for example. Furthermore, the intensity of impacts is further complicated by their varying temporalities, namely seasonality (Wong, 2004). Although theoretically seasonality provides a gap for the environment to recover from tourists, impacts can take place in varying dimensions (Wong, 2004). For example, they can be temporally and spatially cumulative, building up slowly and leading to longer-term intense changes that are often not noticed until too late. For example, touristic air and road transport adds to global climate change through air pollution, affecting tourism detrimentally particularly in alpine sites and small islands (Wong, 2004).

As a final point, it should be noted that it is often tricky or even impossible to separate tourism’s impacts solely from separate anthropogenic activities, as well as denote cause and effect relationships (Butler, 2000).

End Notes

Phew! After all that, I expect you need a cup of tea and a lie down... To summarise, my main points are that tourism can be conceptualised as a cycle, in which environmental degradation is inevitable - unless stringent management steps are taken to prevent this. The environmental impacts of tourisms exhibit strong geographical, spatial and temporal patterns, and there have been various attempts to classify these and their intensity.

Hope you all feel slightly more enlightened after this post, and do drop me a comment with any thoughts/questions! :)

Planetary Boundaries and Ecosystem Services

Greetings, welcome and salutations to all the readers, travellers and curious minds!

Now, before delving into some of the global environmental issues associated with tourism, I thought I’d outline a couple of important concepts that will come in useful when thinking about tourism’s impact on the environment.

Planetary Boundaries

The first is the recently updated framework of planetary boundaries, which essentially lays out a “safe operating space” for societal development. The framework proposes boundaries for the anthropogenic influence on nine key biophysical processes regulating the Earth’s systems stability (Figure 1). Figure 1 illustrates the current state of affairs; past the “danger” end of the yellow zone of increasing risk, there is a vastly increased chance of change to the Earth system's functioning. Already the anthropogenic alteration of 4 of these Earth system processes exceeds the proposed planetary boundary. Evidence of this increasing transgression of boundaries comes, for example, from the rising intensity and occurrence of numerous extreme weather events under the influence of increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. Accounting for 5% of all global greenhouse gas emissions (this being a conservative estimation!), the tourism industry is not guilt-free.

Figure 1. The current levels of the control variables for 7 planetary boundaries. The planetary boundary falls at the end of the green zone. Grey is used where boundaries cannot yet be calculated for a process. Source.

The authors argue that if anthropogenic activities continue to shift the Earth's system out of Holocene conditions, this will likely culminate in an Earth-state that is much less catering to human societies. These boundaries and have been criticised for their subjectivity (although this is controversial and highly debated!), but the authors argue that controlling our activities so we stay within them would greatly reduce the risk of driving the Earth system into this dreaded unhospitable state. Through this blog, I would argue that tourism and travel directly contribute to this path on a global scale through, for example, greenhouse gas emissions from air travel. As such, application of these planetary boundaries is very relevant to management of the sector.

Furthermore, five of these processes, including freshwater use and biosphere integrity, have strong regional and local operating scales and thresholds, but aggregate at the global scale and feedback to the system processes with planetary-scale thresholds, such as climate change.

Figure 2. Framework illustrating the feedbacks between the local/regional impacts and global feedbacks, under the planetary scale framework. Figure displays the 3 zones and likely position of the threshold. Source.

This is especially important when considering the environmental impacts of tourism, as many of the industry’s impacts are exhibited in highly localised settings (i.e. Process Y), yet aggregate together or feedback to global-scale processes (i.e. Process X) to create global environmental problems. For example, localised damage to coral reefs at tourism-intense sites adds to the damage from other anthropogenic activities at many sites worldwide, and reduces resilience to global-scale processes including coral bleaching and climate change.

Ecosystem Services

The nine biophysical processes in the planetary boundaries framework maintain the Earth system’s stability through regulating biochemical flows (e.g. the biological carbon sinks) and by enhancing ecosystem resilience. Ecosystem resilience is linked to the second, distinct yet related, concept I wish to outline in this post – ecosystem services. Definitions of ecosystem services focus on the value and uses that ecosystems provide to humans, for example: “the benefits provided by the ecosystems that contribute to making human life both possible and worth living”.

In light of these human uses, the importance of ecosystem services to the tourism industry is vast. In particular, the category of ‘cultural services’ (Table 1), defined as “nonmaterial benefits people obtain from ecosystems through…recreation, and aesthetic experiences” is important in attracting tourists to a site in the first place. For example, the majority of tourism to the Great Barrier Reef in Australia is brought in by the attraction of the coral reefs ecosystems.

Figure 3. Categorised ecosystem services, and their interactions with human well being, and indirect or direct causes of change in ecosystem services. Interactions can occur at multiple spatial scales and can cross spatial scales. For example, a national demand for firewood can cause a regional loss of woodland, thus affecting the dynamics of a local river system. Interactions can also occur at multiple time-scales. Source.

As such, ecosystems have brought economic prosperity to humans. For the tourism industry, ecosystems in the forms of coral reefs, rainforests, alpine slopes and woodlands (to name a few!) have been critical in attracting tourists and generating income for areas, thus contributing to human well-being. Yet economic prosperity has led to overuse of provisioning services, resulting in over ½ of the world’s ecosystems having been lost in the past century, and the depletion of biodiversity having increased to an unprecedented rate (UN General Assembly, 2010). The overall diversity of services provided by degraded ecosystems is less, reducing the resilience of the ecosystem, and threatening the provisioning of ES in the long run. This blog will touch upon some of the ways tourism has contributed to decline of ecosystem services, through for example, the introduction of non-native invasive species and damage to coral reefs.

Last words...

I hope that this introductory post has provided you with an idea of the tourism-related environmental issues I shall be discussing in this blog, and some of the frameworks through which we can view and analyse them. Tune in next week for an overview of where research into tourism’s impact on the environment all began. ‘Till next time folks!

Travel, Tourism and Environmental Change: An Introduction

Greetings my curious reader! 

I trust you are well, and ready to begin on a journey of self-realisation, enlightenment and deep questioning of your life choices...

The environmental impact of tourism is an issue that has played on my mind for a long time. Every year on visiting my family’s “homeland” of Goa - a small state on the West Coast of India – I can’t help but notice the huge piles of dumped plastic rubbish and debris sitting on the backshores of the beach. It makes me wonder – what were these beaches like before the tourist industry hit it? Are these environmental problems really worth the economic gains? Like so many other tourist hotspots, the environmental impacts of a sudden increase in tourism in Goa have changed the face of its most precious natural sites almost beyond recognition - and it is concerns like this which motivate me to write this blog.

The more often than not typical view on a beach in Goa these days. Charming.

So why is this a topic requiring attention? Well there are many reasons, but to me the most important is that the places most appealing to tourists often happen to be those most ecologically vulnerable – and incredibly beautiful – places on this planet. These ecologically fragile areas are often characterised by species-rich ecosystems, such as coral reefs, which have been damaged globally from reef-based tourist development and associated activities such as trampling. The result of this is a self-destructive industry, degrading the very environment that drew in the tourist development to begin with.

Damaged coral reefs - a pretty morbid site.

So there we have it – with the importance of tourism to the economy of these places, if the physical environment and ecology of the place is destroyed in the process, how will the industry survive into the future? And what will come of these ecologically important natural sites and their flora and fauna?

The environmental impacts: problems and solutions

Uncontrolled tourism can negatively impact the environment when the visitor usage levels exceed the environment's acceptable limits of change. For example, inadequate waste disposal from tourist development can lead to increased  and wastewater entering open water and lakes nearby, threatening human health, flora and fauna. Throughout the blog I shall explore tourism's role in environmental problems such as these in further detail.

These environmental issues began to be addressed in the 70s and 80s, and in response emerging concepts such as ‘sustainable tourism’ and ‘ecotourism’ have arisen. I shall assess the effectiveness of these critically; although widely appraised for their potential positive impacts on environmental conservation, ecotourism can have its own detrimental environmental impacts, such as increased pressure on the conservation areas to which tourism is directed. It’s also important to remember that not all environmental impacts of tourism are negative. For example, income from national park entrance fees can be allocated towards protection of threatened natural areas.

To keep it short and sweet - I will critically explore these topics further with plenty of case studies along the way and an open mind! Stay tuned folks, and drop me a comment telling me what you think! :)