Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. 39, No. 2, pp.

528–546, 2012
0160-7383/$ - see front matter Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Printed in Great Britain
www.elsevier.com/locate/atoures
doi:10.1016/j.annals.2012.02.003

SUSTAINABLE TOURISM: RESEARCH

Abstract: Social and environmental impacts, responses and indicators are reviewed for the
mainstream tourism sector worldwide, in five categories: population, peace, prosperity, pollu-
tion and protection.
Of the 5000 relevant publications, very few attempt to evaluate the entire global tourism sec-
tor in terms which reflect global research in sustainable development. The industry is not yet
close to sustainability.
The main driver for improvement is regulation rather than market measures. Some tourism
advocates still use political approaches to avoid environmental restrictions, and to gain access
to public natural resources.
Future research priorities include: the role of tourism in expansion of protected areas;
improvement in environmental accounting techniques; and the effects of individual percep-
tions of responsibility in addressing climate change. Keywords: indicator, development, enter-
prise, environment, community, social. Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

INTRODUCTION
Tourism researchers first turned their attention to social and envi-
ronmental issues almost four decades ago (Allen, Long, Perdue, &
Kieselbach, 1988; Brougham & Butler, 1981; Cater, 1987; Cohen,
1978; Farrell & McLellan, 1987; Liu & Var, 1986; Smith, 1977; Turner
& Ash, 1975; Young, 1973). Research using the specific term sustain-
able tourism, however, commenced barely two decades ago (May,
1991; Nash & Butler, 1990). The first decade yielded compilations
(Coccossis & Nijkamp, 1995; Hall & Lew, 1998; McCool & Moisey,
2001; Stabler, 1997; Swarbrooke, 1999), and basic frameworks from
backgrounds in tourism (Butler, 1999; Clarke, 1997; Hall & Butler,
1995; Hughes, 1995; Hunter, 1997), economics (Driml & Common,
1996; Garrod & Fyall, 1998) and environmental management (Buckley,
1996). The second decade yielded a number of reconceptualisations,
and a series of critiques including Sharpley (2000), Casagrandi and

Ralf Buckley (Director, International Centre for Ecotourism Research, Griffith University,
Australian 4222, <[email protected]>) leads Griffith University’s research in sustain-
able tourism, currently ranked first worldwide. He has 750 publications including 200
journal articles and a dozen books, about half in ecotourism, and has worked in >40
countries.

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Rinaldi (2002), Gössling (2002), Liu (2003), Saarinen (2006) and Lane
(2009).
As we enter a third decade, this review takes stock of progress by
assessing the scope, focus and outcomes of academic research publica-
tion in sustainable tourism, against the practicalities of sustainability in
the commercial tourism industry. Its basic premise is that the key issues
in sustainable tourism are defined by the fundamentals of sustainabil-
ity, external to the literature of tourism research. This premise relies
on the axiom that both the tourism industry, and sustainability, are
real-world phenomena. Therefore, this review does not attempt to de-
duce internally-generated research themes from analysis of bibliomet-
ric patterns in sustainable tourism publications. Instead, it constructs
externally-generated themes by applying the key components of sus-
tainability to tourism, and uses these to evaluate the sustainable tour-
ism literature. This yields two outcomes. Firstly, it uses the results of
research to assess the current sustainability of the tourism industry. Sec-
ondly, by comparing relative research effort against industry signifi-
cance, it identifies priorities for future research.
This is a review specifically of the tourism research literature. Re-
search in science, environment, resource management, global change,
human health, economics and development policy is also relevant to
sustainable tourism, but for reasons of space and focus, is not detailed
here. The literature of tourism is large, >150,000 items in total, with
5,000 relevant to sustainable tourism (CIRET, 2012). Because of
space constraints, this review can cite <250 individual items, i.e. <5%
of the relevant literature. It largely omits topics which have been
reviewed recently, such as water consumption and climate change
(Gössling et al., 2011; Weaver, 2011). It examines the mainstream com-
mercial tourism industry: recreation, ecotourism and responsible tour-
ism are considered only where relevant. It first defines a framework for
evaluation, under five main themes. It then compares the tourism re-
search literature against that framework. For each theme, it summa-
rises outcomes of all relevant research to date, supported by a
representative selection of critical citations. Finally, it compares re-
search effort and results against real-world progress and significance.
The five themes used for the evaluation framework are: population,
peace, prosperity, pollution, and protection. The rationale is as follows.
The fundamental concern of sustainability is that aggregate human im-
pacts threaten the survival of humans and the ecosystem services on
which they depend (Pereira, Leadley, Proença, Alkemade, & Scharle-
mann, 2010; Persha, Agrawal, & Chhatre, 2011). Impacts have grown,
ultimately, because biological evolutionary pressures promote contin-
uing human reproduction and competitive consumption. Sustainabil-
ity requires modifications to human society so as to reduce its
aggregate impacts. Impacts depend on: (a) the size and distribution
of the global human population; (b) its social organisation, including
economy, governance and civil society; and (c) the consumption,
pollution, and/or protection of nature as a result of such social orga-
nisation. World population is a key predictor of current and future
human impact on the planet. Peace is a global measure of successful