Autor(es): Ribeiro, Cátia Sofia Magrito
Data: 2012
Identificador Persistente: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.5/5320
Origem: Repositório da UTL
Assunto(s): social-ecological systems; resilience; protected areas; nature tourism; sustainability; uncertainty
Mestrado em Engenharia do Ambiente - Instituto Superior de Agronomia
The Resilience thinking changes our way of understanding the Social-Ecological Systems and of assessing their sustainability because it favors a holistic vision and uncertainty is the key feature in its models. Recently a revision of this approach has been developed to analyze the sustainability of protected area tourism. This dissertation takes this conceptual framework and tries to apply it to a specific case study, the Parque Natural Vale do Guadiana‗s tourism system. In the first part of this dissertation a review about the sustainability concept and its importance in the tourist sector, especially in protected areas tourism, is made and the way that it can affect the development in rural areas is discussed. A comparison between several methodologies for assessing the sustainability of tourism with a detailed explanation about the resilience thinking and its framework is also presented. In the second part, this methodology is applied to the analysis of the tourism system at the Parque Natural Vale do Guadiana (PNVG) in order to discuss the contribution of tourism management to the system‘s resilience as a whole. A reflection on the advantages and disadvantages of the use of the resilience framework in the sustainable management of tourism systems is also made.
