Tourism Growth Alone Fails to Deliver Balanced Sustainable Development, Study Finds

Tourism is often celebrated as an engine of sustainable development, but a new study suggests that the sheer volume of visitors matters far less than how tourism is structured and how efficiently existing infrastructure is used. The research, published in the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, examines the ten countries with the highest tourism intensity and finds that hotel occupancy rates, rather than raw tourism growth, show a positive and statistically significant association with an overall index of progress on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

The team, led by Haydar Karadağ with colleagues including Musa Gün, Ahmet Şit, Mustafa Şit and Anisur Rehman, set out to address a gap in the literature. Previous work has largely tested the tourism–sustainability relationship through single indicators, individual destinations or narrow economic and environmental outcomes. Few empirical studies have asked how the composition and utilisation of tourism activity jointly shape progress across multiple goals at once.

Methodologically, the study uses a panel-data framework covering the ten most tourism-intensive countries. From several indicators the authors construct a composite Sustainable Development Goal index using principal component analysis. They then estimate how two dimensions of tourism — demand intensity and accommodation utilisation — affect both the composite index and individual goals.

The headline result concerns the hotel occupancy rate. Higher occupancy, meaning more efficient use of existing beds and rooms, is positively and significantly associated with the overall SDG index. In other words, filling the rooms a destination already has appears to contribute to sustainable development, while simply expanding visitor numbers does not automatically translate into balanced progress across the goals.

Beneath the aggregate picture, the effects are strikingly heterogeneous. Tourism expansion produces positive effects for some socioeconomic outcomes, but it generates greater pressures on the environmental dimensions of the agenda. The study identifies SDG-13 on climate action, SDG-14 on life below water and SDG-15 on life on land as the goals where tourism growth imposes the heaviest burdens.

The authors also observe differentiated effects for SDG-1 on poverty reduction and SDG-10 on reduced inequalities. This means tourism’s social footprint is not uniform: the same growth that lifts some socioeconomic indicators can affect disparities differently depending on how the sector is organised, and the study does not claim a single direction of effect for these two goals across all countries examined.

The central implication is that tourism growth does not automatically deliver balanced sustainable development. How tourism is structured and utilised matters as much as how much tourism a destination receives. The findings demonstrate that the composition of tourism activity, not just its scale, shapes which goals advance and which come under pressure.

For policymakers, the study points away from visitor-volume maximisation and toward what the authors call value-oriented tourism. Their recommendations include more efficient use of existing accommodation capacity, responsible tourism practices and stronger environmental safeguards, particularly for the climate, marine and terrestrial goals where pressure is greatest.

The findings carry the usual caveats of a comparative panel study of ten countries: the analysis identifies associations within this specific group of tourism-intensive economies rather than universal causal effects. Still, the work offers a more multidimensional empirical perspective on the tourism–SDG relationship than studies built on single indicators, and it reframes the policy question from how many tourists a country attracts to how well it uses the tourism it already has.

Subject of Research: How tourism-demand intensity and accommodation capacity utilisation affect Sustainable Development Goal outcomes in tourism-intensive countries

Article Title: Beyond tourism growth: how tourism-demand intensity and capacity utilisation shape sustainable development in tourism-intensive countries

Article References: Karadağ, H., Gün, M., Şit, A., Şit, M., & Rehman, A. (2026). Beyond tourism growth: how tourism-demand intensity and capacity utilisation shape sustainable development in tourism-intensive countries. Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-026-01155-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13412-026-01155-3

Keywords: tourism, sustainable development, Sustainable Development Goals, hotel occupancy, tourism intensity, principal component analysis, panel data, climate action, life below water, life on land, poverty reduction, inequality