Contribution to assessement of the tourism impact on landscape

Abstract

Tourism is one of the largest and fastest-growing economic sectors in the world and it has a variety of impacts on the environment and local communities as well. For a long time it was considered as the purest part of human business. Many adverse tourism impacts on landscape have appeared in context of tourism development, therefore sustainable tourism should be taken into consideration. That is why it is necessary to find out limits to maintain the environment as well as tourism, because as it turns out in status quo it does not work as it should do. As the scale of tourism grows, the resources become more unsustainable. Destination with damaged environment loses its attraction and this fact causes increasing of building a new tourist destination mostly on unsuitable places. Mostly visitors and entrepreneurs do not realize that each place does not fit to build all tourist activities. Then the landscape is under the uncontrolled load which weights the environment. But tourism does not have only this dark side. In many regions it is a necessary human activity for further region development. The specific assessment of the tourism impact should bring a closer look on this problem and help to specify which regions are suitable for tourism spreading or not. In realized research focused on selected communities in the N1zk Jesenik Highlands there was the idea to quantify three suggested data sets (specific environmental area value, tourism potential and tourism infrastructure load) necessary for tourism impact assessment. Data sets were evaluated according to points distribution using pair wise comparison and compared based on correlation and regression. Finally the outputs were used for further recommendations.