Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Contemporary Research Paradigms of Sustainability, Şule Başar, Editör, Scholars Press, Chisinau, ss.129-139, 2021
Tourism is an important activity that contributes directly to income and employment,
especially for regions with a wide range of natural and cultural attractions. However,
sometimes this contribution causes the economic and socio-cultural effects of tourism
to be ignored (Result, 2020). There are opinions that most of these negative effects are
caused by mass tourism (Akıncı & Kasalak, 2016). It is possible to state that the reason
for this is that mass tourism is seasonal; the demand is high only in certain periods and
the resources are lack.
Today, tourism is experiencing a change due to the changing reasons and
expectations of people for travel. The main source for tourism is no longer the trio of
sea, sand and sun, but rather factors such as nature, culture, history and art. Especially
natural resources and the protection of these resources, tourism's structure that takes
into consideration the natural environment creates a sustainable concept at the end.
When the world is considered as a closed system spaceship, it has to use its resources
sustainably in order to maintain its own system (Sharpley, 2000).However, with the
unconscious and economic use of nature by humans, the balance in nature has
deteriorated and both the environment and living species have been damaged. This
destruction affects not only problems such as global warming, deterioration of
ecological balance, pollution, ozone layer depletion and melting of glaciers, but also
the social and economic systems of people (cited in Pelit et al., 2015). Sustainability,
which emerged with the idea of minimizing the effects caused by these problems, is a
concept that takes not only the present but also the future into account. The importance
of sustainability has emerged as a result of increasing the environmental awareness of
people, governments and societies due to the destruction of the natural environment in
which people live (Hardistry, 2010). Sustainability was associated with the
sustainability of living things on earth in the 1980s, and this concept, which has taken
a place in vital activities, has been used in different meanings such as sustainable cities,
sustainable agriculture, sustainable growth, and sustainable tourism (Alpagut, 2010).
In addition, the concept of sustainable development was defined in the Brundtland
Report published in 1987 as meeting today's needs without jeopardizing the ability of future generations to meet their needs. The report focuses on poverty eradication, equal
use of resources, responsible consumption, and control of population growth and
development of environmentally friendly technologies (Kozak, 2020).