1、It is thus proposed and supported as a favourable development path by environmental organisations and institutions as dissimilar as the World Wide Fund for Nature and the World Bank
2、in the sense that it puts a minimum threat to local ecosystems
through the conversion of lands, trampling, collection of species
3、In the light of this, the article seeks to discuss ecological
footprint analysis (EFA) as a concept to assess sustainability in tourism and to test the hypothesis of ecotourism as a sustainable form of tourism. The focus of the article is on leisure tourism asopposed to business tourism according to definitions
as provided by the World Tourism Organisation.
The Seychelles have been chosen as the study site because they have based their marketing on the image of a pristine, exclusive eco-destination that seriously attempts to integrate environmental conservation and development. As a high-value
destination, the islands attract a particularly wealthy clientele
4、However, recent control and monitoring measures might have improved the
situation, and the new Environment Management Plan of Seychelles 2000/2010 is a comprehensive document aiming at the implementation, continuation
and extension of environmental conservation towards ‘sustainable development”
5、largely a result of the insight that the environmental consequences of this rapidly growing industry can no longer be ignored
6、In addition to these rather precise estimates of the footprint of different fossil energy sources, this study attempts to include the additional global warming potential of emissions at flight altitude. Air travel deserves special consideration in the calculation process because its emissions are released in 10/12 km height in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere, where they have a larger impact on ozone, cloudiness and radiative forcing than they do at the Earth’s surface (IPCC,
1999). Aircraft emissions thus need to be weighted with a factor of 2.5——3.0 to include their additional warming potential (IPCC, 1999). In order to account for these effects, the energy footprint of air transport has been weighted with a factor of 2.7。
In order to aggregate the different categories of space to a total footprint, the areas are multiplied S. Go¨ssling et al. / Ecological Economics 43 (2002) 199——211 201 by ‘equivalence factors’ (Wackernagel et al.,1999a). These factors inform about the category’s relative yield (measured in primary or green biomass productivity) as compared with worldaverage space, which is given the equivalence
factor of 1. Average arable land is, for example, 3.2 times more biologically productive than worldaverage space, and is therefore multiplied with a factor 3.2. The equivalence factors for each category of space, based on recent revisions in the Living Planet Report
7、The economy is diversified, also building on a strong fisheries industry