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It is acknowledged that tourists, as consumers of environment, can damage the very resources which form the basis of the tourism industry. What can be done to make current tourism activities environmentally more compatible? The initiative rests with the tourism firms themselves. Environmental auditing provides tourism firms with a tool to assess heir environmental performance, identifying any negative environmental impacts and evaluating the opportunities to change current practices in order to improve that performance. The advantages and procedures of environmental auditing are summarized and examples given of the actual and potential application of the different types of environmental audit by tourism firms. Factors influencing the adoption of environmental auditing by tourism firms are discussed and the extent of current use by British tourism firms reviewed. In conclusion, it is argued that the adoption of environmental auditing will lead to improved environmental performance of tourism firms but not necessarily to environment-sustainable tourism.
ALL ACTIVITIES CONSUME RESOURCES and produce wastes and, therefore, have a potential to damage the environment. Tourism is no exception: the global environment is the source of all material inputs feeding the tourism subsystem and is the sink for all its wastes. Tourists' per capita consumption of resources, multiplied by tourist numbers, gives the total flow of resources -- or throughput -- from the global environment to the tourism subsystem, then hack to the global environment as waste. Such throughput growth (Goodland, 1991) in the past, and at the present, sees many tourism firms and organizations, tourism destination planning authorities and tourists themselves acting in environmentally-damaging was. Such damage is, however, only one of the serious issues facing tourism destination authorities: in addition sociocultural changes, arising from acculturation and commodification processes, follow from tourism development and both sets of changes have to be balanced with how the contribution of tourism to the destination economy can be maximized in terms of jobs and the material standard of living or the host population. These issues are most marked in destinations catering for mass tourism. If mass tourism continues to operate at present levels -- transporting large numbers of holiday-makers over considerable distances to restricted and concentrated destinations and encouraging them to consume at high levels further damage will occur. Emphasis here is on tourism's interaction with...