A Consideration of the Factors Influencing Tourism Development in Relation to Biodiversity Conservation

We can define the territorial heritage as a product that shaped its identify in the mixing of environmental, building and anthropogenic components. Nowadays, the traditional theories of development, based on an unlimited economic growth consider “territory” in more and more reducing terms. If on the one side it has produced a fast growth, on the long term it has caused environmental and social degradation. Tourism can represent an essential component in the creation of competitive advantage of a specific area, mostly in its sustainable dimension. Nevertheless, in an economic analysis of tourism based on natural resources, its distinctive feature is that natural resources are an input of productive process, enter tourist utility function and produce a trade-off between the quantity of the resource used for tourism and the quality of its supply. The importance of this relationship results above all respects the optimal use of resource, in particular when the tourist preferences are characterized by “aversion to crowding”. Evaluating tourisms we can see that a tourism based on natural resources is considered a snob-good, so that the quality of a tourist site decreases by crowding of natural resources. In this perspective, this study tries to focus on how the quality of resources is inversely proportional to its degree of crowding and, consequently, as in the tourism sector there is an economic incentive to conservation. Key-Words: Rural tourism, sustainable tourism, aversion to crowding, conservation of resources, Mediterranean islands, rural development