Overtourism as an Emerging Threat for Sustainable Island Communities – Exploring Indicative Examples from the South Aegean Region, Greece | SpringerLink
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Overtourism as an Emerging Threat for Sustainable Island Communities – Exploring Indicative Examples from the South Aegean Region, Greece

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Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2023 Workshops (ICCSA 2023)

Abstract

Tourism is admittedly perceived as a key driver for many national economies, displaying a large share in the GDP of many countries around the globe, including Greece. However, evolving trends of the sector and the noticeable, exponentially rising, tourism density and intensity of certain highly-rated destinations – especially of the vulnerable to overtourism coastal and insular ones – create severe concerns as to their ability to cope with the negative repercussions of tourism in environmental, economic, social and cultural terms; and establish the “overtourism” concept, i.e. the alarmingly surpass of destinations’ physical, ecological, social, cultural, economic, psychological, etc. capacity thresholds at certain times and in certain locations. Overtourism, as an already visible threat in several highly-rated urban/insular destinations around the globe that largely affects both habitants’ quality of life and tourists’ experience, is the focus of this paper, aiming to assess spatial and developmental pressures exerted in selected Greek island destinations, i.e. fragile spatial entities in terms of natural and cultural assets. Towards this end, three distinct case studies in South Aegean are explored, namely Mykonos, Paros-Antiparos, and Kos-Nisyros; while a number of literature-proven key indicators are used for demonstrating the trajectory through time of these destinations and the unsustainable tourism pattern they display, especially in an environmental degradation and climate change era.

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Lagarias, A., Stratigea, A., Theodora, Y. (2023). Overtourism as an Emerging Threat for Sustainable Island Communities – Exploring Indicative Examples from the South Aegean Region, Greece. In: Gervasi, O., et al. Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2023 Workshops. ICCSA 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14110. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37123-3_29

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37123-3_29

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