Theory: Tourism Impacts and Challenges
Let us start with an overview abou the impacts (positive and negative) of tourism and the challenges tourist destination have to face. Just click on the heading to get started with our training booklet.
If you want to download / print it, you find a pdf version at this link.
7. Environmental Impacts
Environmental Impacts
The environmental dimension of sustainable tourism, as with sustainable development more generally, is often publicly perceived as the central foci of the sustainability concept (Mowforth & Munt, 2009). Although this concentration tends to be on the natural habitats, the environment fully comprises:
- Natural resources
- Natural environment
- Farmed environment
- Wildlife
- Built environment
In this sense, environment is taken to mean the combination of natural and social systems that make up an ecosystem. In the absence of an attractive environment, there would be little tourism at a destination. The natural environment is the raw material of the tourism experience – the islands, beaches, mountains and reefs that form a central component of the tourism product. Natural resources are the raw materials that sustain the operation of tourism businesses. Consider a community sea kayaking venture for example. It is reliant on the sea, the weather and the landscape (natural environment) for the product and the land, the water and the food (natural resources) for its operations. For tourism to be successful, both the product and the operational raw materials need to be well looked after.
The farmed environment is often overlooked as part of the tourism experience but there is an increasing enthusiasm for farm tourism in many parts of the world and farmland and landscapes are a core component of rural tourism. Wildlife, including both plant (flora) and animal life (fauna), has long been considered to have considerable tourism value in a natural or semi-natural state (national or marine parks, diving, safari, whale watching tourism) or in an artificial setting (zoos, wildlife parks, museums). However, wildlife is still particularly vulnerable to adverse impacts of tourism as it is often experienced in areas that are not designed to cope with large numbers of people. The built environment includes all the man made structures in the tourism context, particularly those that have historic or cultural value, and also those structures which use land resources such as hotels, airports, roads and railways.