Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
'sustainability' which has now embraced both recreation and tourism (see Hall and Lew
1998; Page et al. 2001). One early definition of carrying capacity by the Countryside
Commission (1970:2), with its central precept of the long-term capacity of resources and
human activity, embodied the dual characteristics of protection and use: the level of
recreation use an area can sustain without an unacceptable degree of deterioration of the
character and quality of the resource or recreation experience. This was followed by an
identification of four types of recreational carrying capacity: physical, economic,
ecological and social carrying capacity.
Plate 4.2:
Athens, Greece. Historic
sites such as the Acropolis suffer
visitor pressure and erosion of the built
fabric.
The notion of physical carrying is primarily concerned with quantitative measures of
the number of people or usage a site can support, primarily being a design concept. This
may also act as a constraint on visitor use by deliberately limiting access to sites. The
notion of economic carrying capacity is primarily concerned with multiple use of
resources (Pigram and Jenkins 1999; Coccossis 2004), particularly its compatibility with
the site and wider management objectives for the site. The notion of ecological (or what
Lavery 1971 a terms 'environmental capacity') is primarily 'concerned with the
maximum level of recreational use, in terms of numbers and activities, that can be
accommodated by an area or ecosystem before an unacceptable or irreversible decline in
ecological values occur' (Pigram and Jenkins 1999:91). The chief problem here lies in
what individuals and groups construe as acceptable change. In an early study by Dower
and McCarthy (1967) of Donegal, Ireland, they estimated the environmental capacity
which recreational and tourism resources could support at any point in time. Lavery
(1971 a) developed these ideas, based on subsequent work by Furmidge (1969) and
Houghton Evans and Miles (1970) to produce a series of suggested space standards for
environmental capacity. Although this table may be criticised for using such absolute
values of capacity, it is notable that it provides a starting point for discussing how many
visitors can support a site and how many might be too many. While critics have
questioned the notion of fixed capacity for individual sites, it should be stressed that
carrying capacity will only ever be one element of a management strategy for outdoor
