1. A Tourism Carrying Capacity Indicator for Protected Areas
- Author
-
Stella Kostopoulou and Ioannis Kyritsis
- Subjects
business.industry ,National park ,Geography, Planning and Development ,Environmental resource management ,Distribution (economics) ,Geography ,Sustainability ,Carrying capacity ,Lorenz curve ,business ,Protected area ,Tourism ,Sustainable tourism ,Earth-Surface Processes - Abstract
The aim of this article is to develop a tourism (Carrying Capacity Indicator) for protected areas that could assist regional planners and park managers to promote an equitable form of the spatial distribution of visitors environmentally sensitive area, various indicators have been proposed, with regard to ecologically sustainable tourism. In this paper, we examine the unequal distribution of visitors to a protected area that causes significant additional environmental pressure on some sub-areas. This additional pressure, which may exceed the landscape's carrying capacity, cannot be measured by the commonly used indices that represent an average for the whole area. Our objective is to depict the variability of pressure intensity within a protected area. For this purpose we introduce an indicator adjusted to the Gini co-efficient resulting from the Lorenz curve, used by economists to measure the unequal distribution of income. The proposed indicator is applied to the Mount Olympus National Park, Gr...
- Published
- 2006