Can tourism contribute to environmentally sustainable development? Arguments from an ecological limits perspective

Abstract

Abstract Due to its potential to deliver economic benefits without major extractive activities, tourism is often considered as a means to sustainable development. However, there is inadequate problematization of the environmental impact of tourism in existing tourism research. A major weakness of the sustainable tourism discourse is the negligence of relatively well-known ecological principles of limits, entropy, and Jevons paradox. This selective review puts forth the argument of ecological limits to inform tourism sustainability research and advances two hypotheses for further problematization of the concept and future research. Consequently, it is argued that with the accelerating impoverishment of the biosphere, tourism could only meaningfully contribute to environmentally sustainable development by pivoting away from incremental solutions and by embracing the idea of transformative change through concepts such as degrowth and planetary limits.