Negative environmental impacts

Destinations often attract tourists because of their environment.

This environment may be man-made (ancient monuments, cultural buildings, resorts, etc.) or it could be natural (areas of natural beauty, climate, wildlife etc.) but as we said in the previous step, the negative effects of tourists on the very environment that drew them often outweigh the positive, so we will focus on these first.

There are two main ways that tourism negatively impacts on the environment:

• Through the development of the area
• Through the behaviour of tourists

The development of an area results in the construction of facilities, not only attractions and hotels but also buildings, roads, parking lots, facilities etc. These are often situated near tourism activities, which depend on destinations’ natural resources, which can result in damage to the surrounding area.

Such infrastructure developments might impact biodiversity and ecological habitats, damage original visual resources, and weaken the destination’s regional resilience to natural disasters in extreme weather conditions, which in turn may result in negative phenomena, such as soil erosion and landslides. The negative impacts also include the overuse of water resources and deforestation.

The behaviour of tourists, and their use of facilities, can result in environmental pollution through an increased number of people. As well as air pollution from an increase in the use of fossil fuels, pollution of the land and sea swells in tourist areas and in tourist seasons.

One recent and well publicised example, is related to plastic:

Tourists cause 40% spike in plastic entering Mediterranean Sea each summer, report finds but there are others such as Paradise lost: Beautiful islands ruined by tourism and Tourists Caused Too Much Damage to the Beach From Leonardo DiCaprio’s ‘The Beach’.

It is becaiuse of articles like these that concern over the use of plastic is at the forefront of may people’s thoughts and, as Jane Ashton said in the video above, creating the impetus for orgainisations to change.

In addition to these publicised examples, academic research has also found that tourism negatively affects the environment of a destination:

Environmental pollution due to increased tourism, such as traffic congestion, littering, and noise, is an important impact that affects the quality of residents’ daily lives.

_{(Chang et al, 2018)}

Your task

Discuss what negative environmental impacts are currently being focused on at both the destination and whole climate level. What solutions have been proposed? Are they realistic and achievable? Do you have any solutions of your own that you would like to propose?

References

_{Chang, K. G., Chien, H., Cheng, H. & Chen, H. (2018). The impacts of tourism development in rural indigenous destinations: An investigation of the local residents’ perception using choice modeling. Sustainability, 10(12), 4766. https://locate.coventry.ac.uk/permalink/f/1ea4mrv/TN_scopus2-s2.0-85058577989}