Tourism and Assessing the Impacts - A New Zealand Perspective

Tourism is undoubtedly the single largest industry in the world and contributes vast amounts of revenue into any given country. In New Zealand alone, tourism accounted for 10.2% of Gross Domestic Product in 1996 or in dollar terms $11.78 billion (Collier, 1999). In 1999, half a billion people traveled worldwide which indicates the huge scale of the tourism industry. And the speed of tourism growth is also outstanding - airplane numbers have increased thirty times since 1960 and in the last fifteen years the number has doubled. And the amount of international tourists is also increasing rapidly. In 1939 there were only one million tourists worldwide whereas in 1999 there were more than one million international tourists from New Zealand alone (Otago University Resource, 2001).
After understanding how large the tourism industry is and the speed it is growing at, it is necessary to then learn about the associated impacts from tourism. The impacts are divided into three categories: ...