Environmental auditing in planning for sustainable island tourism

Abstract

Sustainable tourism should be consistent with the tenets of sustainable development. Accordingly, prior to considering its nature, it is instructive to put it into the context of this wider concept by briefly examining those tenets and their implications. The origins of the concept of sustainability can be traced back to the conservation movement in the mid-nineteenth century, and the economic notion of maximum sustainable yield with regard to common property resources such as ocean fisheries. Boulding (1966) anticipated more recent thinking in his perception of the spaceship earth, echoed by Schumacher (1973), while others (e.g. Forrester, 1971; Meadows et al., 1972) forecast more dramatically resource depletion and environmental degradation.