Abstract
Attractiveness of tourist destinations relies heavily on the quality of natural/cultural resources, the maintenance of which in such destinations is fraught with difficulties. This is particularly true in Mediterranean islands, i.e., fragmented, naturally- and culturally-endowed territories and globally-acknowledged mass tourism destinations, confronted with severe threats, especially in overcrowded coastal zones. The goal of this paper is to outline a Tourism Environmental Sustainability (TES) approach as a means for assessing and regularly monitoring tourism environmental impacts on Mediterranean insular destinations. TES follows an indicator-based stream, built upon a combined top-down and bottom-up approach for guiding the selection of island-specific tourism sustainability indicators. The top-down one brings on board distributed knowledge on relevant, well-established global/European indicator systems (e.g. UNWTO, ETIS Toolkit); and sets up an enriched indicator pool for assessing tourism environmental sustainability. This is downscaled to the Mediterranean islands’ context, and is further elaborated by means of a bottom-up approach, supporting indicators’ prioritization on the ground of key attributes/vulnerability of each specific island under study. Implementation of TES in Zakynthos Island, Greece, namely an island currently confronted with severe tourism-related environmental impacts, demonstrates the need for well-documented, of global reach tourism sustainability assessments in alignment with place-specific peculiarities/fragility of the natural environment.
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Leka, A., Tsigarda, N., Stratigea, A. (2023). Assessing Tourism Environmental Sustainability in Mediterranean Insular Destinations – Case Study Zakynthos Island. In: Gervasi, O., et al. Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2023 Workshops. ICCSA 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14110. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37123-3_27
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