Routledge Handbook of Tourism and Sustainability

Sustainability remains one of the major issues in tourism today. Concerns over climate and environmental change, the fallout from the global economic and financial crisis, and the seeming failure to meeting UN Millennium development goals have only reinforced the need for more sustainable approaches to tourism, however they be defined. Given the centrality of sustainability in tourism curricula, policies, research and practice it is therefore appropriate to prepare a state of the art handbook on the relationship between tourism and sustainability.

This timely Handbook of Tourism and Sustainability is developed from specifically commissioned original contributions from recognised authors in the field, providing a systematic guide to the current state of knowledge on this area. It is interdisciplinary in coverage and international in scope through its authorship and content. The volume commences with an assessment of tourism’s global environmental, e.g. climate, emissions, energy use, biodiversity, water use, land use, and socio-economic effects, e.g. economic impacts, employment and livelihoods, culture. This then provides the context for sections outlining the main theoretical frameworks and constructs that inform tourism and sustainability, management tools and approaches, and the approaches used in different tourism and travel industry sectors. The book concludes by examining emerging and future concerns in tourism and sustainability such as peak-oil, post-carbon tourism, green economy and transition tourism.

This is essential reading for students, researches and academics interested in the possibilities of sustainable forms of tourism and tourism’s contribution to sustainable development. Its assessment of tourism’s global impact along with its overviews of sectoral and management approaches will provide a benchmark by which the sustainability of tourism will be measured for years to come.

C. Michael Hall is a Professor in the Department of Management, Marketing and Entrepreneurship, University of Canterbury and Docent, Department of Geography, University of Oulu, Finland. Co-editor of Current Issues in Tourism, he has wide ranging research interests in tourism, mobility and regional development, food, and environmental history.

Stefan Gossling is a Professor at the Department of Service Management, Lund University and the School of Business and Economics, Linnaeus-University, Kalmar, Sweden, and research coordinator at the Western Norway Research Institute’s Research Centre for Sustainable Tourism. His research interests include tourism and climate change, tourism and development, mobility studies, renewable energy, low-carbon tourism, as well as climate policy and carbon trading.

Daniel Scott is a Canada Research Chair in Global Change and Tourism in the Department of Geography and Environmental Management, University of Waterloo. His research interests include tourism and climate change, sustainable tourism, protected areas management and climate change, and tourism-recreation climatology.