means respect for other livelihoods and customs. Such variety and her-itage is a major resource for tourism in a world that is fast becoming homogenised into a global economy. A major component of environment and culture is their aesthetic appeal. Although the focus has often been on international markers such as world-renowned heritage sites, the aes-thetic qualities of regular townscapes and general landscapes should not be overlooked.
All the earlier mentioned needs should be addressed within ecological parameters to sustain both the physical and human environment. Conser-vation of cultural legacies should not be ignored. The ecological process needs to be understood so that tourism intrusions will have the minimal impact, especially in sensitive areas like shorelines, mountains, and wet-lands. The concern over maintaining our biological diversity is particularly germane to tourism, which thrives on the appeal of different flora and fauna along with a distinctive sense of place. Finally, the need to sustain our basic life support systems is paramount. If these basic needs are not met, then our higher level and discretionary needs like travel will fail to materialize.
Measurement Issues
Although it is relatively easy to conceptualise and to proselytise about the needs for sustainable tourism development, it is far more challeng-ing to develop an effective, yet practical, measurement process. An important issue in the Taylor–Stanley matrix is establishing the carrying capacity levels, ‘the ability of a given environment to accommodate particular activities without suffering significant and irreversible damage’ (Owens and Cowell, 1996) for tourism in a variety of locales and circumstances.
Initially the notion of an objective, scientific determination of an area’s carrying capacity was appealing to tourism managers. However, the 180 Global Tourism
Figure 9.5: Suggested research areas and priorities for sustainable development in tourism.
Source: Taylor and Stanley, 1992.
recognition that carrying capacity is a social construct involving a com-plex interplay of economic, environmental, political, and social forces means that the concept has been used little in practice (Wearing and Neil, 1999). Further, the point of view that consideration of environmental dis-turbance ‘must be augmented by consideration of human values’ (Wagar, 1964) has expanded in recent times. For example, Middleton and Hawkins (1998) asserted that carrying capacity must take into account ‘factors such as tourists’ behavioural patterns, facility design and management, the dynamic character of the environment and the changing attitudes of the host community.’
The literature on this subject shows carrying capacity techniques have been applied in a variety of circumstances, often clarifying and confirm-ing levels of suspected environmental or social stress, but they leave open to discussion what it all signifies and what policy should be undertaken.
A major difficulty is that carrying capacity implies the existence of fixed and determinable limits to development and that if one stays below those threshold levels no changes or deterioration will occur. We now appreci-ate that all changes and modifications to the environment have an incre-mental effect, so some degree of change must be acknowledged and accounted for at all developmental stages.
As a consequence of this recognition, several alternative approaches to the original carrying capacity concept have emerged in recent years, notably the limits of acceptable change (LAC) (Stankey, et al., 1995), (Wearing and Neil, 1999), ecological footprint analysis (EFA), and (Gössling, et al., 2002). According to Sun and Walsh (1998), ‘the LAC approach is based on decisions regarding how much change is acceptable to users and managers. The VIM system highlights the importance of judgmental consideration in identifying management actions.’
This LAC approach, according to Wearing and Neil (1999), involves both resource managers and stakeholders in:
• Identifying acceptable and achievable social and resource standards,
• Documenting gaps between desirable and existing circumstances,
• Identifying management actions to close these gaps, and
• Monitoring and evaluating management effectiveness.
VIM principles, according to Wearing and Neil (1999) are:
• Identifying unacceptable changes occurring as a result of visitor use and developing management strategies to keep visitor impacts within acceptable levels;
• Integrating visitor impact management into existing agency planning, design, and management processes;
Tourism and sustainable development 181
• Basing visitor impact management on the best scientific understand-ing and situational information available;
• Determining management objectives that identify the resource condition to be achieved and the type of recreation experience to be provided;
• Identifying visitor impact problems by comparing standards for acceptable conditions with key indicators of impact at designated times and locations;
• Basing management decisions, to reduce impacts or maintain accept-able conditions, on knowledge of the probaccept-able sources of, and inter-relationships between, unacceptable impacts;
• Addressing visitor impacts using a wide range of alternative management techniques; and
• Formulating visitor management objectives, which incorporate a range of acceptable impact levels, to accommodate the diversity of environments and experience opportunities present within any natural setting.
Although LAC and VIM principles might be applied relatively effectively at the local level, they have limited applicability on a global scale.
Gössling and colleagues (2002) argued that LAC and VIM focus on changes occurring in the local environment, largely ignoring the global consequences of travel. . . . ‘Existing concepts are thus insufficient to make clear statements about the sustainability of particular forms of travel or the sustainability of certain destinations.’
Gössling and associates (2002) have made a contribution to the evalu-ation of the environmental impacts of tourism through their EFA, a concept that uses space equivalents to calculate the appropriation of bio-logically productive area by individuals or nations. As has been claimed,
‘[t]he idea of the concept is to compare the area required to support a certain lifestyle with the area available, thus offering an instrument to assess if consumption is ecologically sustainable’ (Gössling, et al., 2002).
However, despite the value of this contribution to the quest for global sustainability, there are problems with the operationalisation of the EFA concept. For example, although the environmental impact of air travel has been widely recognised (Wackernagel and Rees, 1996), the conclusion of Gössling and colleagues (2002) that ‘air travel should . . . be actively dis-couraged’ is unlikely to be implemented and, therefore, is unlikely to have any significant impact on atmospheric pollution levels.
Carrying capacity, LAC, VIM, and EFA processes examine the sustain-able tourism issue from the supply side of the tourism experience, but if tourism is to be a sustainable economic proposition it cannot ignore its customers. Hence, more thought is now being applied to the demand 182 Global Tourism