This paper examines whether the environmental impact of international tourism depends on the growth regime in which it operates, covering the 10 most visited countries over 2004–2020. Environmental pressure is measured through the ecological footprint, rather than CO2 emissions as is common in the literature, since it captures a broader range of human demands on natural systems. A fixed-effects panel threshold model is estimated to allow for regime-dependent effects. Our results reveal a double-threshold structure: tourism growth reduces environmental pressure only within an intermediate contraction regime, while its effect is negligible in both the lower and upper regimes. This suggests that a single linear coefficient inadequately represents the tourism-environment relationship. Among the control variables, economic growth increases ecological pressure while urbanization reduces it. This study contributes to the literature by focusing on the world’s leading destinations, adopting a broader measure of environmental pressure, and showing that a threshold framework uncovers variation that standard linear models miss. Policy implications point away from simply expanding tourist arrivals toward reducing the environmental intensity of tourism through cleaner transport, greener infrastructure, and better urban planning.
Beşer et al. (Sun,) studied this question.