An Overview of the Environmental Impacts of Coastal Tourism

Tourism industry has been put within potentially fragile environment such as coral reefs, mangroves, and polar areas, and has become one of the major factors shaping landscape and sea in coastal zones. In order to improve the sustainable development of coastal tourism, there is a need to focus on the negative effect of tourism on environment in coastal zone. The aim of this paper is to examine this prior researches related to this topic. The study revealed that the environmental impacts caused by tourism can be seemed as a complex system including diverse internal and external interacted factors, and the relationships between coastal tourism and environment adapts over time in different stages of coastal destination development.