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Assessing Tourism Environmental Sustainability in Mediterranean Insular Destinations – Case Study Zakynthos Island

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Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2023 Workshops (ICCSA 2023)

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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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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography and Regional Planning, School of Rural, Surveying and Geoinformatics Engineering, National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), Athens, Greece

    Akrivi Leka, Natalia Tsigarda & Anastasia Stratigea

Authors
  1. Akrivi Leka
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  2. Natalia Tsigarda
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  3. Anastasia Stratigea
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Akrivi Leka .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Perugia, Perugia, Italy

    Osvaldo Gervasi

  2. University of Basilicata, Potenza, Italy

    Beniamino Murgante

  3. University of Minho, Braga, Portugal

    Ana Maria A. C. Rocha

  4. University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy

    Chiara Garau

  5. University of Basilicata, Potenza, Italy

    Francesco Scorza

  6. University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, MA, USA

    Yeliz Karaca

  7. Polytechnic University of Bari, Bari, Italy

    Carmelo M. Torre

Appendix I

Appendix I

See Table I1.

Table I1. Categories and subcategories of global (UNWTO) and European (ETIS) tourism indicator systems used in this work, Source: Own elaboration from WTO, WTO/ETIS, and ETIS
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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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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37123-3_27

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