CHALLENGES FOR TOURISM IMPACT ASSESSMENTS
There are several challenges to measuring the impacts of tourism.
They have been discussed in more detail elsewhere (Wall and
Wright 1977), but some of them apply to all forms of impact assessment
and include:
• the difficulty of establishing a base level against which to
measure change;
• the difficulty of disentangling human-induced change from
natural change;
• spatial and temporal continuities between cause and effect;
• the complexity of environmental interactions—primary
impacts induce secondary impacts and tertiary impacts and
so on.
Other challenges are more specific to tourism and include:
• the diversity of activities involved;
• the diversity of environments in which tourism occurs;
• the mobility of tourists so that impacts occur en route as
well as on-site;
• Cumulative impacts.
Furthermore, there are three main methods by which impact
assessments are undertaken:
• after-the-fact analyses
• monitoring of change through time
• simulation
Each of these three requirements differ with respect to costs of
time and money, produce results with differing characteristics and,
consequently, different degrees of managerial utility.