Tourism, Development and the Environment - Tourism and Development: Concepts and Issues - page 267

landscape can accommodate tourism pressures before unacceptable or irre-
versible decline occurs. Cooper et al. (1993) suggest that the limits of carrying
capacity should really be termed 'saturation limits' rather than carrying
capacity, which they define as: 'that level of tourist presence which creates
impacts on the host community, environment and economy that are accept-
able to both tourists and hosts, and sustainable over future time periods'
(Cooper et al. , 1993: 95).
Despite the limited appeal of the carrying capacity concept resulting
from its inherent fuzziness - what, for example, is 'acceptable' damage,
according to whose needs is it determined and how is it measured ? - it has
nevertheless been embraced widely as an appropriate diagnostic of the envi-
ronment's capability to accommodate change. The UN World Tourism Org-
anisation considers carrying capacity to be 'fundamental to environmental
protection and sustainable development . . . carrying capacity limits can
sometimes be difficult to quantify, but they are essential to planning for
tourism and recreation' (WTO, 1992: 23). Similarly, the Brundtland Report
enshrines the carrying capacity concept in the more general development
context. It states that '[d]ifferent limits hold for the use of energy, materi-
als, water and land . . . The accumulation of knowledge and the develop-
ment of technology can enhance the carrying capacity of the resource base.
But ultimate limits there are, and sustainability requires that long before
these are reached, the world must ensure equitable access to the con-
strained resource and reorient technological efforts to relieve the pressure'
(WCED, 1987: 45). Thus, the notion that there is a fixed 'ceiling' to devel-
opmental activity in general, and tourism in particular, has long served as
the guiding principle informing assessment of tourism's environmental
sustainability (see Telfer, 2013, for an analysis of the Brundtland Report
and tourism).
As will be discussed later, not only does the concept of carrying capacity
have rather limited applicability in relation to complex socio-environmental
systems within which tourism occurs, but without a means of quantifying
environmental change the concept is hollow. Not only are measurable envi-
ronmental indicators pivotal to the application of carrying capacity as a plan-
ning and management tool often lacking (not least because concerns over
sustainability often surface after environmental degradation has occurred),
but also the absence of time series data precludes attempts to monitor the
processes and rate of environmental change. It is interesting to note, however,
that in some cases this can be circumvented through formal Environmental
Impact Assessment (EIA) which has evolved into an important proactive and,
frequently, legally required planning tool. EIA can be applied to predict and
measure the impacts - social as well as environmental - of any development
project, and often utilises environmental data as a baseline for monitoring the
rate and direction of environmental change, and recording whether the impact
falls within the parameters of acceptability.