Sustainable tourism in Greek islands: the integration of activity‐based environmental management with a destination environmental scorecard based on the adaptive resource management paradigm

Abstract

Tourism is a major industry that can lead to economic gains as well as to degraded environment and social infrastructure. Tourism has the potential to destroy the available common environmental resources through overuse and poor management practices, as limited information disclosure and poor monitoring of actions encourage the perpetuation and extension of environmental problems. Based on the adaptive resource management paradigm for addressing problems related to the use of the commons, this paper suggests a methodology for the development of a management tool that can provide island hotels with a continuous fl ow of timely, relevant, accurate and objective information on the environmental impact of critical corporate activities. The tool, named the destination environmental scorecard (DES), draws on activity-based management concepts and can help local hotel SMEs measure and compare their performance against certain standards and thus conduct operations in a responsible and measurable way to the benefi t of both business fi nancial performance and regional sustainability. The paper presents the DES operational characteristics and the potential benefi ts from its implementation.

Sustainability and financial performance of small and medium sized enterprises: A bibliometric and systematic literature review

“…Only two articles within this cluster adopt a pure qualitative approach (Karatzoglou & Spilanis, 2010). The first one presents the development of a management tool called destination environmental scorecard, based on the adaptive resource management paradigm.…”

Corporate Environmental Strategies Towards Sustainable Development

“…Jansson et al , ). Karatzoglou and Spilanis () discuss methods to develop environmental management tools for sustainable tourism, and the principles of management activity are based on tools integrated into the design of an environmental scorecard.…”

What Drives Built‐Up Area Expansion on Islands? Using Soil Sealing Indicators to Estimate Built‐Up Area Patterns on Aegean Islands, Greece

“…In this paper, we seek to examine what drives the expansion of built‐up areas on islands, using as a case study the North and South Regions Aegean Islands (Greece), comprising in total 43 inhabited island municipalities. These islands have experienced deep socio‐economic changes in the last decades, with intense depopulation in the 1950s to 1980s for all but a handful of islands, and rapid but very unequal tourism and second homes development afterwards (Karatzoglou & Spilanis ). At the same time, the expansion of built‐up area was driven by the considerable difference in profits from selling land for building compared to profits from agriculture or any other land use (Spilanis et al .…”