Title: THE ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS OF SUSTAINABLE TOURISM; LOCAL VERSUS GLOBAL ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINTS IN

Tourism has been proposed as an important tool for sustainable development, yet decision-makers lack appropriate measures for its economic, social, and environmental success. “Sustainable tourism ” implies a finite limit to tourism growth beyond which point it is no longer sustainable, yet to date, benchmark environmental indicators have not been developed to define a destination’s carrying capacity. This dissertation utilizes concepts from ecological economics towards defining a sustainable scale for tourism development. In addition, an ecological footprint indicator (EF) is applied to two populations (residents and tourists) responsible for both local and global environmental pressures. These distinctions are important because traditional concepts of tourism carrying capacity focus solely on impacts to the host destination. This creates the possibility that tourism activity viewed as locally sustainable is still causing impacts elsewhere on the planet. By widening the scale of the ecological footprint, I quantify and discuss the differences between local and global environmental pressures of tourism. Proponents of “alternative tourism ” (agrotourism, ecotourism, bicycle tourism) hav