Tourism and Environmental Sustainability

Running head: TOURISM AND ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY
Tourism and Environmental Sustainability
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1TOURISM AND ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY
Executive Summary
Tourism is an activity and an industry that increasingly being viewed as unsustainable for the
environment. Tourists tend to litter a lot when they visit exotic destinations and locations,
which in turn contributes to land and air pollution by a considerable degree. Tourist activities
in developing countries in particular, also result in scarce resources like water and energy
being used up in order to meet the needs and requirements of tourists, resulting in local
populations losing out on the use of such resources. This report provides an overview as to
why, given environmental concerns and wellbeing, tourism as an activity is not sustainable.
The report concludes with some important recommendations that governments of developing
countries can take into consideration to prevent tourism from having an adverse impact on the
surrounding natural environment.

2TOURISM AND ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY
Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................2
1. Tourism leads to the Exploitation of Scarce Resources in Developing Countries.............2
2. Tourism hampers with the Quality of Life of Local Communities in Developing
Countries....................................................................................................................................3
3. Tourism Contributes to Environmental Pollution in Developing Countries......................4
4. Tourism has a Negative Impact on the Consumption of Food Resources in Developing
Countries....................................................................................................................................6
5. Measures that can be undertaken by Governments to make Tourism More Sustainable...6
Conclusion..................................................................................................................................8
References..................................................................................................................................9

3TOURISM AND ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY
Introduction
While tourism is an activity that can considerably boost the resources of a country, it
can have quite a negative impact on a country’s natural environment. As tourist footfall in a
country increases, it leads to a significant amount of pollution being generated that has an
adverse effect on the environment, which in turn affects the physical and mental lives of
people residing in such an environment (Fennell 2015). Although numerous efforts are being
made on the part of tourism industries and tourism companies like travel agencies to make
travelers conscious of environment and sustainability issues when they embark on a vacation
to a near or distant land, most of this appears to fall on deaf ears, without tourists contributing
quite substantively to pollution levels in countries worldwide (Fennell 2015). This paper
argues that given environmental concerns, tourism in the developing world in particular is
unsustainable, concluding that significant efforts need to be made on the part of the
governments of developing countries to restrict tourist arrivals and influxes in order to
demonstrate care and concern for the natural environment, and to ensure its preservation and
conservation in the process.
1. Tourism leads to the Exploitation of Scarce Resources in Developing Countries
It is important to remember that many of the developing countries of the world are
those that are faced with a number of issues pertaining to quality of infrastructure and
scarcity of water, among other things (Hall et al. 2015). Resources such as food and energy
tend to be quite scarce in developing countries and when tourism is encouraged in such
countries, such resources tend to become even more scant because of high demand, resulting
in the population of developing countries, and marginalized populations in particular, losing
out heavily as a result (Hall et al. 2015). Countries of South and Southeast Asia such as India,
Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Thailand all benefit a lot from tourism in the sense that