Efforts by nations around the Gulf and Red Sea to diversify their
national economies and foster development through tourism are
producing major increases in tourist numbers. Research in both
regions is providing a better understanding of the environmental
impacts of coastal and marine tourism, although uncertainty remains
about numbers of these tourists. We have listed the range
of environmental impacts that have been attributed to tourism,
and in doing so have shown that the evidence for several of these
impacts is either lacking or confounded. A detailed accounting of
the direct and indirect impacts is constrained by the lack of a
conceptual framework of the full extent of this sector’s potential
impacts that allows for tourism’s impacts to be disentangled from the impacts of other human activities occurring in the coastal zone.
Only then will the consequences of national tourism development
aspirations be known. An elaboration of the model proposed by El
Sherbiny et al. (2006) that incorporates activities, stressors emanating
from activities, and pathways to ecological receptors is a
useful starting point. Information from other parts of the world
about linkages between activities, stressors and ecological receptors
will be of some but limited value because of the extreme environmental
conditions in the Gulf and Red Sea and the different
resiliences of biological assemblages to human activities. Poor
understanding of baseline conditions, and shifting baselines especially
in the rapidly developing Gulf coastal regions seriously jeopardise
the likelihood of understanding tourism’s impacts and
assessing management effectiveness.