Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
air and water quality (Wall and Wright 1977; Mathieson and Wall 1982; Edington and
Edington 1986; Meyer-Arendt 1993; Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment
1997).
The majority of studies have examined the impacts of tourism and recreation on a
particular environment or component of the environment rather than over a range of
environments. According to Mathieson and Wall (1982:94), 'there has been little attempt
to present an integrated approach to the assessment of the impacts of tourism'. However,
there is clearly a need to detect the effects of tourism on all aspects of an ecosystem. For
example, the ecology of an area may be dramatically changed through the removal of a
key species in the food chain or through the introduction of new species, such as trout, for
enhanced benefits for recreational fishing or game for hunters (Hall 1995). In addition, it
is important to distinguish between perceptions and actual impacts of tourism (Orams
2002). For example, many visitors believe an environment is healthy as long as it looks
'clean and green'. The ecological reality may instead be vastly different; an environment
may be full of invasive introduced species which, although contributing to a positive
aesthetic perception, may have extremely negative ecological implications (Newsome et
al. 2002). For example, while New Zealand promotes its tourism very strongly on the
basis of its 'clean, green' image, the reality is quite different with respect to many tourist
locations which may have very few indigenous species present and may have very low
biodiversity (Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment 1997).
Research on impacts has focused on particular regions or environments which has
limited the ability to generalise the findings from one area to another. In addition,
research on visitor impacts is comparatively recent and is generally of a reactionary
nature to site-specific problems. We therefore rarely know what conditions were like
before tourists and recreationalists arrived. Few longitudinal studies exist by which the
long-term impacts of visitation can be assessed. Therefore, there are a number of
significant methodological problems which need to be addresssed in undertaking research
on the environmental affects of tourism (Mathieson and Wall 1982:94):
• the difficulty of distinguishing between changes induced by tourism and those induced
by other activities
• the lack of information concerning conditions prior to the advent of tourism and, hence,
the lack of a baseline against which change may be measured
• the paucity of information on the numbers, types and tolerance levels of different
species of flora and fauna
• the concentration of researchers upon particular primary resources, such as beaches and
mountains, which are ecologically sensitive.
Nevertheless, despite the difficulties that have emerged in studying the relationship
between tourism and the natural environment, it is apparent that 'a proper understanding
of biological, or more specifically, ecological factors can significantly reduce the scale of
environmental damage associated with recreational and tourist development' (Edington
and Edington 1986:2).
Tourism and recreation can have an adverse impact on the physical environment in
numerous ways; for example, the construction of facilities that are aesthetically
unsympathetic to the landscape in which they are situated, what D.G.Pearce (1978:152)
has described as 'architectural pollution', and through the release of air-borne and water-
