Introduction: tourism, health and wellbeing and protected environments.

Abstract

This introductory chapter reflects on the themes of (1) tourism and protected areas' sustainability, and (2) health and wellbeing in protected areas, before outlining the section organization of the book.

Overtourism and the Local Community Well-Being

“…These trends require preserved natural surroundings (protected areas in particular) and authentic lifestyles that they harbour. Many such tourism forms (Azara et al 2018;World Bank and Spenceley 2020) differentiate in the main travel motive, but their scope remains not so clear-cut because they entwine and intersect in several points, including: (1) the need for preserved natural and sociocultural assets; (2) well-being and health purposes of travel; (3) the necessity of sustainability approach to tourism development.…”

“…The need for further research regarding sustainability as an approach to the complex relationship between tourism, health, well-being, and protected areas is not novel (Azara et al 2018). Within such a relationship, research focusing on local communities' roles, impacts, and particularly aspects preventing or contributing to their well-being in the context of overtourism, is necessary.…”

“…So far, extensive research has been conducted on various aspects of overtourism, including its impacts on destination residents (Cheer et al 2020;Cheung and Li 2019;Goodwin 2017;Milano 2017;Milano et al 2019a;Muler Gonzalez et al 2018;Perkumienė and Pranskūnienė 2019;Sari and Nazli 2020), nature-based and protected area tourism (Chung et al 2018;Hockings et al 2020;Leung et al 2018;Mandić 2019;Spenceley et al 2017) in overtourism context (Koščak et al 2020). Also, there is a rich base of research on local communities in tourism (Fiorello and Bo 2012;Lopes et al 2015) as well as on human and community well-being (Cloutier Cloutier et al 2019;Sarkki 2017), its connection to nature (Azara et al 2018;Naidoo et al 2019;Sandifer et al 2015) and tourism (Dwyer 2020;Musikanski et al 2019). This chapter fills the gap in the research of local communities' well-being in nature-based tourism in the era of overtourism.…”

“…Therefore, nature-based destinations worldwide, including terrestrial and particularly marine protected areas, are in dire need of governance and management approaches that enable usage-protection equilibrium (Sarkki 2017;Villasante et al 2016). Within such an intersection, tourism can contribute towards improving human health and well-being and stimulate appreciation and stewardship of nature (Azara et al 2018). The sustainable approach to contemporary and future tourism development is founded in its capacity to prevent and annul potential negative impacts of overtourism, especially in preserving local communities' well-being on tourism destinations, protected areas in particular.…”

Tourism development and sustainable well-being: a Beyond GDP perspective

“…Ecosystem services, connecting natural capital to people's well-being, comprise four main types of services: provisioning services (supplying materials and food), cultural services (scientific, recreational, aesthetic, educational and spiritual enrichment), regulating services (climate control, air and water filtration) and supporting services (carbon storage, waste assimilation), essential to the biodiversity necessary for the health and survival of all species (Radermachier, 2015). Given that a destination's quantity and quality of natural capital is a core tourism resource (Ritchie & Crouch, 2012), responsible environmental management can support tourism growth while providing a range of services to improve resident well-being (Azara et al, 2018).…”