Environmental Impacts of Tourism

Tourism is defined by the United Nations World Tourism Organization as the activities of persons traveling to and staying in places outside their usual environment for not more than one consecutive year for leisure, business, and other purposes. Tourism can also be viewed as a form of development that depends on natural resources and the built environment. The environment is at the core of tourism because tourism depends on maintaining the scenic attractiveness of a destination that people want to see and experience. However, as soon as tourism begins to occur, it changes the environment to facilitate its own development.

At one time, tourism was seen as a clean industry, causing few environmental impacts. Although it is the world's largest industry by employment and is acknowledged to produce significant environmental impacts, tourism is not as detrimental to the environment as other large industries such as mining and manufacturing. It was not until the late 1960s that the impacts of tourism on the environment began to be recognized. By 1970, the first studies of the environmental impacts of tourism were made. Today, it is widely acknowledged that tourism produces environmental impacts across time and scale. As such, tourism's impacts are difficult to categorize, quantify, measure, and differentiate from those of other activities or natural processes. Tourism's environmental impacts are also often cumulative, coming from many small sources rather than a few large ones. These impacts can be manifest in the form of solid and liquid wastes; air, visual, and noise pollution; congestion; crowding; soil erosion; and deforestation. The intensity, location, and diffusion of these impacts change over time because of factors such as economics, technology, and social and political changes, making assessment difficult and constant monitoring important to maintain environmental integrity. Tourism also leads to further development of destinations due to land development or through infrastructure improvements such as road repair, increased water supply, and increased capacity to handle waste, attracting other economic activities that might otherwise not have come to the destination. Tourism's environmental impacts also originate in various economic sectors and in activities such as hiking, which are not recorded by the economy. Certain tourist activities are also activities of the destination population (entertainment, shopping), and impacts in a tourism-related sector can cause impacts in other unrelated sectors. All these factors make it difficult to determine the exact environmental impacts of tourism. In addition, the type and intensity of impacts depend on the type of development, the characteristics of tourists, and the characteristics of the destination.

To identify the environmental impacts of tourism, an assessment must be made of the physical impacts of tourism development independently of other activities, the baseline environmental conditions at the destination, the types of flora and fauna, and the ecosystem's ability to handle impacts caused by tourism. Often, the environmental impacts of tourism can be placed into one of three categories.

Direct effects are those that originate directly from tourism activities. These include

• sewage disposal,
• increased pollution from tourist transport (e.g., more solid wastes),
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• use of fossil fuels to provide other services for tourists (accommodation and food),
• increased noise levels from entertainment and more traffic,
• hunting and fishing impacts on wildlife,
• damage to fragile beach areas by trampling and development, and
• destruction of vegetation by hikers.

Litter left by tourists in the Namib-Naukluft Park, Namibia, Africa

Source: Nigel J. Dennis; Gallo Images/Corbis.

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