Thresholds and Standards for Tourism Environmental Impact Assessment

Tourism is a highly heterogeneous industry sector, and different environmental planning tools are applied at different scales and in different jurisdictions. In most countries only certain components of the tourism industry, and particular types of tourism development, are subject to project-scale environmental impact assessment. Precisely because of its diffuse distribution and variable scale, tourism can provide a useful tool to test the effectiveness of EIA systems. Tourism can also illustrate the dilemmas involved in designing EIA systems which are both effective and efficient, in the sense that they require just enough environmental information, commensurate with the scale of each individual proposal, to make well-considered development control decisions. Currently, there are many cases where identical tourism development proposals in adjacent legal jurisdictions would yield very different EIA requirements (Warnken and Buckley 1995, 1996). This is perhaps an indication of how difficult it can be to set thresholds and standards for tourism EIAs.