Using resilience concepts to investigate the impacts of protected area tourism on communities

Protected area tourism is a growing trend worldwide. It has an enormous potential to impact on local communities. Traditional assessment methods tend to focus on current conditions using sustainability indicators that are often poorly chosen resulting in the misidentification and misinterpretation of impacts. Research in systems thinking and resilience suggest that future conditions may be different, more extreme and rapidly changing than previously experienced, requiring very different approaches to assessment. New methods acknowledging uncertainty and change are required. Here we present a novel approach to investigating the impacts of protected area tourism on communities by framing them as a social-ecological system and adopting resilience assessment principles.