Sustainability, Outdoor, Tourism, and Adventures

Tourism is struggling to recover. Usually overcrowded tourism destinations in this season normally swinging into high gears remain largely deserted, and in everybody’s eyes still reverberate the images of empty beaches, streets, squares. The true is some of these destinations, although devoured by flocks of tourists, were depopulated far before the Covid19 crisis. Like any industry, or I’d better say like any human activity, tourism will always impact the destination. Tourism causes emissions, smog, pollution, waste. This short list relates only a slice of the its impact, and does not fleshes out more extreme situations, i.e. overtourism. Overtourism can be defined as tourism where the maximum capacity of a tourist destination is quantitatively exceeded by the number of arrivals. Simply put, there are too many tourists. The impact of overtourism transcends the elementary list mentioned above, and it leads to a complete reversal of tourism's purposes. If, as it is well...

Tourism is one of the most volatile among the World Big Industries. On the A-list of the world most productive human activities, until January tourism was the third largest industry, generating 10% of the planet's gross domestic product (GDP). Remarkably, tourism’ numbers were constantly growing: whereas global GDP increases on average by 2% per year, tourism has stabilized around 7% of annual growth in recent years (+4 in 2019). Then, the Covid19. As volatile as it is, when a crisis of whatever nature erupts in a destination, the tourism system may temporarily collapse. And the Covid crisis makes no exceptions among the world destinations, as it hitting 188 countries and the entire global travel network. The World Tourism Organization recently estimated that the overall impact of Covid for the January-April semester with 100% destination with travel restrictions is of about 180 million fewer international arrivals and US$195 billion lost in export revenues from inter...