Tourism-environment analysis: the case study of Glyfada

Abstract

This exploratory work aims to further the study of the interdependent bonds which characterize the relationship between tourism and the environment, promoting wider perspectives and a more holistic approach to environmental matters and related practices involved in tourism, travel, hospitality and leisure sectors, which are nowadays essential to ensure and sustain excellence of tourist destinations. That is to acknowledge the relevance of the role that each territory and its particular environment plays in any tourism development process while considering the concept of a tourist area cycle of evolution and its implications for management of resources. In this sense, the quality and the competitiveness of any local tourism industry is submitted along time to different factors of environmental change that are not exclusively due to just tourism production and consumption processes. In fact, alike as one of many other economic activities competing in a territory, tourism development needs to be planned and managed within a sustainable and integrated framework at different spatial scales if environmental excellence of tourist destinations wants to be enhanced and guaranteed. Sustainable development on global and local scale basis comes forth nowadays as the renewed paradigm of an old outlook, that is, the wise use of resources in order to guarantee development process success in the long term run. As a new paradigm of development, sustainability has being adopted by a growing number of local authorities and tourist entrepreneurs worldwide. Therefore sustainable development has being seen by the tourism industry as an opportunity competent in resources quality conservation through integrated policy, planning and management. Thus, the basic principles which define sustainable development are being introduced on the tourism sector during the past two decades giving tourism the opportunity to gradually assume the challenge to put forward a strategy towards sustainability in order to effectively contribute to sustainable development on a global scale. Notwithstanding, tourism industry is facing a series of difficulties to go from theoretical principles to practice. Thus, and despite the attractiveness and the necessity for achieving a more sustainable tourism development, its implementation proves to be extremely difficult due the complex nature of development processes and its multiple stakeholders, interests and values. The full paper intends to analyze in the first place several factors of environmental change that affect a tourist destination along its evolution cycle, verifying and identifying for this purpose some of the existing interdependent bonds within the conceptualization of a tourism/environment system. The analysis will continue after through a seashore tourist municipality case study to illustrate the impact of environmental change on the tourist destination activity and dynamism both in terms of demand and supply. Afterwards, the research will focus on management practices responses in order to contribute with a series of proposals to define a set of measures aimed at minimizing the negative impact on the environment resulting from the local tourist activity in the considered municipality. The impact of regional and global factors of environmental change that affect the municipality as a tourist destination will be also discussed. Finally, a series of conclusions derived from the analysis conducted will be presented.