Indicators for Assessing Sustainability in Mediterranean Tourism Destinations: A Systematic Review

This study presents a systematic critical review of 91 peer-reviewed publications published between 2000 and 2024, examining the sustainability of Mediterranean tourism destinations through indicator-based frameworks. Using the Scopus database (Elsevier) and PRISMA-based screening, the review coded studies by methodological approach, indicator type, sustainability dimension, stakeholder involvement, and data source. Quantitative and mixed-methods designs dominated the corpus, together accounting for 90.1% of the reviewed studies, while geographical coverage was highly concentrated in Spain (52.7%), Greece (14.3%), and Italy (13.2%), which jointly represented 80.2% of the corpus. The literature also expanded markedly over time, from 8 studies (8.8%) in 2003–2010 to 39 studies (42.9%) in 2021–2024. Dimensional analysis showed strong emphasis on economic and environmental sustainability assessment, addressed in 92.3% and 91.2% of studies respectively, whereas cultural sustainability received attention in only 23.1% of the corpus. These findings highlight persistent problems of geographic imbalance, limited standardisation, and insufficient multidimensional integration in Mediterranean tourism sustainability assessment. In response, the study proposes the Mediterranean Sustainability Assessment Framework (MSAF), an appraisal-oriented framework for evaluating and improving destination-level sustainability indicator systems in terms of dimensional completeness, methodological pluralism, and contextual embeddedness.