Tackling challenges for Mediterranean sustainable coastal tourism: An ecosystem service perspective

Abstract Coastal tourism is a growing industry sector in the Mediterranean Basin. This and the other human activities occurring along the coastline share spaceand resources, leading to conflicts for divergent uses. Moreover, the overexploitationof natural resources degrades and depletes coastal habitats, with negative feedbackeffects for all human activities. Hence, both tourism and the other human activities have to consider their dependence on coastal ecosystem services, and act at technical and policy level to reach a compromise that preserves natural resources in the long term. Here we provide a conceptual frameworkillustrating the complex relationships and trade-offs among threats from coastal tourism and from other human activities and coastal ecosystem services, with a focus on cultural ones. We discuss the negative feedbackson tourism development and provide examples of geospatial analysison cumulative threats generated by other human activities and affecting tourism itself. The proposed conceptual frameworkand the threat analysis aim at highlighting the negative feedbackeffects of human driven threats on the development of Mediterranean coastal tourism, through an ecosystem serviceperspective. Both tools provide valuable insight for supporting decision makers and planners in achieving integrated coastal management, with a focus on sustainable tourism.