As one of the world's largest industries and one of its fastest growing economic sectors, tourism has a multitude of impacts, both positive and negative, on people's lives and on the environment. The quality of the environment, both natural and man-made, is essential to tourism. However, tourism's relationship with the environment is complex. It involves many activities that can have adverse environmental effects. Negative impacts from tourism will arise when the level of visitor use is superior to the environment's ability to cope with this use.
Uncontrolled coastal tourism development poses potential threats to many natural areas around the world as it can put enormous pressure on a very narrow area. Many of these impacts are linked with the construction of general infrastructure such as roads and airports, and of tourism facilities, including resorts, hotels, restaurants, shops, golf courses and marinas. Such developments often lead to impacts such as soil erosion, increased pollution, waste discharges into the sea, natural habitat loss and associated loss in biodiversity and increased pressure on endangered species. This is particularly true for some of the world's most ecologically fragile areas such as wetlands, mangroves, coral reefs and sea grass beds. Furthermore, it often puts a strain on water resources, and it can force local populations to compete for the use of critical resources such as fish. By involving many activities that can have adverse environmental effects tourism has the potential to gradually destroy the environmental resources on which it depends. Usually these effects are dynamic and often interactive.
Some of the negative effects of tourism are much less philosophical. In many areas, crime increases dramatically during the tourist season, falling back to more usual levels when the visitors have all gone home. Although much of this will be targeted at the supposed easy pickings of the tourists themselves, it is not without its repercussions on the local population and the police and consular authorities on the ground. In some places, the price of many staple foods and other essential items can be hiked up considerably to maximize the catch of tourist dollars, but this artificial inflation can often catch local people too – who often can least afford it. In addition, in countries which are rich in wildlife and natural beauty, although initiatives to bring in tourists often contribute to parts of the local economy, by no means everyone benefits. It is also one of eco-tourism’s greatest ironies that attempts to safeguard the environment can also make life worse for indigenous people, particularly if vast swathes of their traditional lands become part of a protected reserve.
In many ways, tourism is no different – it is impossible to visit “untouched” lands without leaving your touch upon them, somehow. With many of the world’s most beautiful and fragile eco-systems inhabited by some of the poorest people, it is inevitable that tourism throws the often conflicting environmental, economic and social forces into sharp relief. Much of the damage is unintentional; even if we try to live up to the responsible traveler’s mantra of taking nothing but photographs and leaving nothing but footprints, sometimes the footprints we leave will be deeper than we think.
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