What is it about?

We usually think about tourism as an activity that has positive or negative impacts on people, places and the environment. This article challenges that simple picture. Tourism does not exist separately from the world it affects. It is part of complex relationships involving people, animals, plants, water, landscapes, technologies, policies and many other forces. These do not simply receive the effects of tourism; they also actively shape what tourism is and what it can become. We therefore propose looking at tourism impacts as constantly evolving relationships rather than as fixed outcomes that can simply be measured and managed. This broader perspective can help us understand how tourism is entangled with environmental and social change, and how more sustainable futures might emerge from these relationships.

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Why is it important?

Despite decades of discussion about sustainable tourism, tourism continues to contribute to environmental pressures and social inequalities. One reason is that conventional approaches often treat tourism as a separate system whose negative effects can be identified, measured and managed. This article proposes a more fundamental change in perspective. It asks us to recognize that tourism is inseparable from the wider living world and that humans are not the only actors shaping its consequences. Animals, plants, water, landscapes, technologies and material conditions all influence what tourism makes possible. Understanding these relationships can help researchers and planners move beyond narrow ideas of “sustainable tourism” towards approaches that are more adaptive, caring and responsive to complex planetary challenges. Rather than assuming that we can fully control tourism's impacts, the article encourages us to learn how to work with uncertainty, change and the many human and non-human lives affected by tourism.

Perspectives

For me, one of the most important implications of this article is that it asks us to reconsider what we mean when we talk about a tourism “impact”. The word itself suggests a relatively straightforward relationship: tourism does something to a destination, a community or an environment. But the reality is far more complicated. Tourism is already part of the places, ecologies and relationships that it appears to affect. As an anthropologist, I find the invitation to take these entanglements seriously particularly compelling. It means paying attention not only to people and their perspectives, but also to landscapes, animals, plants, water, infrastructures and other forms of life and matter that participate in shaping tourism. This does not mean ignoring human responsibility. On the contrary, it requires us to think more carefully about where agency and responsibility lie. Ultimately, I see this article as an invitation to become more attentive and perhaps also more humble. Instead of assuming that we can make tourism sustainable simply by measuring its impacts and managing them better, we need to learn how to live, research and plan within a world of relationships that we can never completely control. That shift may open up more imaginative, caring and genuinely transformative ways of thinking about tourism and our shared planetary future.

Professor Noel B. Salazar
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Embracing the more-than-human nature of tourism impacts, Annals of Tourism Research, September 2026, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.annals.2026.104256.
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