5. Conclusions
and recommendations
Within
the present project, calculations of the indicators have been realised for only
two of the proposed four “general indicators“. Inputs from other
SIP projects (such as air emissions from transport)
are
expected to allow an estimation of a number of indicators reflecting pressures
generated by the sector tourism. In order to separate the share of pressures
attributable to tourism from those coming from other sectors, some methods have
been proposed: practical tests will be needed to evaluate the extent to which
these methods are useful.
Apart
from the air emissions caused by tourism transport, the impacts on land and
water areas, including biological resources, are probably the most severe
aspects of the influence of tourism. These effects are not evenly distributed
throughout the EU region, but are concentrated in certain especially attractive
sites. Although some countries are much more influenced by tourism than others,
the impacts are still concentrated in specific regions, such as mountain areas,
beaches or historical cities. In order to present of the impacts on smaller
areas, a regionalization of the statistics is essential.
At
the same time there is an apparent lack of data needed for the description of
impacts such as: increase of built up areas near shoreline and beaches,
deforestation of mountain areas for the construction of tourist establishments
or increase of land area occupied by transport activities. Other examples of
land use changes, caused by tourism, have been mentioned above in sections 4
and 5.
For
the estimation of some of the indicators proposed by the SAG, no basic data
exists and no means of indirect calculations have been found. Therefore, better
methods of data collection need to be developed. This is the case for, e.g.,
indicators on landscape fragmentation by roads, loss of river bank lands
through artificialisation, loss of priority habitats, development along shore
areas etc. Tourism is not the single cause of these types of pressures and the
problem of non-existent basic data has also been felt in other SIP projects.
Special methodological efforts are therefore urgently needed within this area.
To
make possible estimations of the proposed pressure indicators for the tourism
sector, the following activities are recommended:
- calculation
of pressure
indicators
for tourism, with the aim of separating the influence due to tourism from
pressures already covered by SIP Transport, Energy and Waste, using specific
coefficients as proposed in this report;
- studies
on methods for delimiting tourism intensive areas in a way that permits
presentations of pressure indicators and other statistics for the identified
areas;
- practical
tests of the possibilities to use existing water pollution registers, within
the EU countries, for the calculation of some of the proposed pressure
indicators of the sector tourism on water pollution and water use;
- studies
on methods for identifying and quantifying
changes
of land use and land cover caused by tourism, taking advantage of other ongoing
EU projects (such as CORINE land cover and GISCO) in order to calculate some of
the indicators proposed in this report.
- co-operation
with other institutions and programmes, responsible for data collection within
the sector tourism, in order to add a few questions to the existing surveys on
variables of specific interest from the point of view of environmental impacts
and calculations of pressure indicators.
