Sustainable Environmental Degradation in Ecotourism Development

Ecotourism is a viable alternative for the development of regions and countries with a strong natural resource base. Sustainable development involves the compatibility of the growth in the number of tourists and the preservation of ecologically valuable natural resources. This paper focuses on the relationships between environmental degradation and physical capital in the management of natural resource based tourist products. An ecotourist product is defined as a destination whose basic resource is nature and attracts an inflow of tourists as the main source of income. In particular, we introduce a simple predator-prey model which allows us to derive a general pattern for natural capital with a final phase of declining. This particular pattern is due to the negative influence of the implementation of physical infrastructure on natural resources which are also major sources of consumer attraction. According to this, in a classical welfare optimization framework, we have obtained optimal trajectories for the local consumption and the use of natural capital. In the steady state case, the optimal rate of consumption is strongly dependent on the relationship between the impacts of physical capital in both demand and environmental degradation. The results have general implications for consumer goods with negative externalities which are appreciated by the status of their environmental attributes.