As Part of A Planning System
The definitions of carrying capacity need to be considered as processes within a planning process for tourism development which involves:
- Setting capacity limits for sustaining tourism activities in an area. This involves a vision about local development & decisions about managing tourism.
- Overall measuring of tourism carrying capacity does not have to lead to a single number, like the number of visitors (http://ec.europa.eu/environment/iczm/pdf/tcca_material.pdf. Date assessed 08/03/07).
- In addition, carrying capacity may contain various limits in respect to the three components (physical-ecological, socio-demographic and political–economic).
“Carrying capacity is not just a scientific concept or formula of obtaining a number beyond which development should cease, but a process where the eventual limits must be considered as guidance. They should be carefully assessed and monitored, complemented with other standards, etc. Carrying capacity is not fixed. It develops with time and the growth of tourism and can be affected by management techniques and controls” (Saveriades, 2000).
The reason for considering carrying capacity as a process, rather than a means of protection of various areas is in spite of the fact that carrying capacity was once a guiding concept in recreation and tourism management literature. Because of its conceptual elusiveness, lack of management utility and inconsistent effectiveness in minimising visitors' impacts, carrying capacity has been largely re-conceptualized into management by objectives approaches, namely: the limits of acceptable change (LAC), and the visitor experience and resource protection (VERP) as the two planning and management decision-making processes based on the new understanding of carrying capacity (Lindberg and McCool, 1998). These two have been deemed more appropriate in the tourism planning processes of protected areas, especially in the United States, and have over the years been adapted and modified for use in sustainable tourism and ecotourism contexts (Wallace, 1993; McCool, 1994; Harroun and Boo, 1995).
Read more about this topic: Tourism Carrying Capacity
Famous quotes containing the words part, planning and/or system:
“A mother wants all of life to be painless for her child. This is not a realistic goal, however. Deprivation and frustration are as much a part of life as gratification. It is some balance between these that a mother is looking for. To take the next step is always painful in part. It means relinquishing gratification on some level. If one is totally gratified where one is, why move ahead? If one is totally frustrated, why bother?”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)
“...A shadow now occasionally crossed my simple, sanguine, and life enjoying mind, a notion that I was never really going to accomplish those powerful literary works which would blow a noble trumpet to social generosity and noblesse oblige before the world. What? should I find myself always planning and never achieving ... a richly complicated and yet firmly unified novel?”
—Sarah N. Cleghorn (1876–1959)
“When the finishing stroke was put to his work, it suddenly expanded before the eyes of the astonished artist into the fairest of all the creations of Brahma. He had made a new system in making a staff, a world with full and fair proportions; in which, though the old cities and dynasties had passed away, fairer and more glorious ones had taken their places.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)