Proceedings of the 12th Meeting of
The COMCEC Tourism Working Group
24
destinations will vary considerably, it is important that monitoring protocols are
developed in context-specific and locally meaningful ways. Each member country needs
to determine its position regarding its overall tourism climate, based on where it sits in
destination life cycle models, what its tourism resources are, and what its total tourism
budget is based on the suggested list of KPIs. This involves an on-going process of
acquiring valid and reliable data across these sectors in ways that, ideally, lead to cross-
country comparisons.
Policy advice 3. Identifying current and potential tangible and intangible tourism
resources by taking into consideration destinations carrying capacity, and their long
term protection and survival while avoiding over tourism.
Rationale:
Destinations have different natural and cultural attractions that have different levels of
vulnerability to different types and volumes of touristic activity. The current and
potential resources of destinations should be identified, threats should be eliminated,
and their exposure to tourism activity should be managed. Their allocation needs to be
limited with their capacity to handle tourist volume. This not only applies to natural
resources and species but also cultural resources such as locals’ way of life. Over
tourism is important challenge for many tourism destinations. There are concerns about
the energy consumption, resource depletion, waste management, impacts of tourism on
wildlife and global warming. In this respect, carrying capacities, green certification and
legislations would be tackled in the OIC region to create a more environmentally
responsible tourism.
Policy advice 4. The required mechanisms (e.g. voluntary contribution, tourist tax,
environmental fees) might be introduced to fund the sustainability activities that aim
to protect, preserve the local quality of life and minimize the costs associated with
tourism.
Rationale:
The negative side effects of tourism should be compensated by the actors who are
responsible or benefiting from it. Because different tourism activities create pressures
on local quality of life, the detorriation and use of resources that normally belong to
locals should be paid for while the benefits of tourism towards locals should be
enhanced. Tourist taxes, landing fees, entrance fees to the sites, waste taxes and so on