Sustainable Tourism Development: Strategies, Challenges, and Emerging Opportunities — A System-Dynamics and Multi-Criteria Policy Assessment

Abstract

While tourism drives economic development, its uncontrolled growth degrades the environmental and social assets destinations depend on and accounts for a significant share of global greenhouse-gas emissions. Abstract—Tourism is a key enabler of economic development. Still, when poorly managed, it can degrade the environmental and social resources that underpin destination development and contribute a significant share of global greenhouse-gas emissions. Several approaches exist, such as limiting visitors, imposing tourism taxes, shifting to low-carbon transitions, and spatio-temporal diversification, but quantitative evidence on their long-run impacts in combination remains limited. A system-dynamics (SD) model is created that is reproducible and includes environmental, social, economic, and climate feedbacks in a mid-sized destination, and six policy scenarios are assessed for the next 25 years (2025-2050). The Sustainable Tourism Index (STI) is calculated through a composite process, followed by a Monte Carlo uncertainty analysis (400 runs), a one-at-a-time sensitivity analysis, a policy space sweep (1681 runs), and an entropy-weighted TOPSIS ranking. If the business-as-usual (BAU) scenario prevails, environmental quality will decrease from 0.79 to 0.54, crowding will peak above the social threshold, and the critical environmental-quality threshold has a 31.8% chance of being crossed by 2050. Modest gains (STI 3.5%-7.7%) can be achieved with single instruments, whereas an integrated policy mix results in an STI of 16.0% and ranks first under entropy and equal weighting. The optimum is revenue constrained, with a cap of close to 2.1 million arrivals per annum at an 8.5% levy, resulting in the highest STI (+27.6%) with a 14.8% reduction in cumulative emissions. The results indicate that sustainable tourism requires a package of complementary instruments and the shift from volume to value.