An approach to monitoring and evaluating the environmental performance of Australian beach resorts

Tourism, in Australia and globally, is a growth industry. With this growth has come concern for the implications of tourism for resources and for people exposed to the periodic influx of visitors. As a result, the tourism industry has experienced increased scrutiny in regard to environmental management and efforts are being made to achieve more sustainable forms of tourism development. Reflecting this trend, a number of beach resorts along the Australian coast are now being designed and operated on ecologically sensitive lines, and there is increasing evidence that tourism developers are seeking effective ways of monitoring and evaluating their environmental performance. Environmental auditing is seen as a useful approach for determining the extent to which coastal resorts are in compliance with regulatory requirements and environmental standards and policies. In this paper, a conceptual and systematic framework and procedures for an environmental auditing program, within which a series of activities can be carried out and decisions made, are presented. These, then, help define a set of desired conditions and the management actions necessary to maintain or restore those conditions. The need to improve the process of monitoring and evaluating the environmental performance of tourism development, and to incorporate the results of such monitoring and evaluation into decision‐making processes, will become even more crucial in the future. The challenge facing Australian tourism development is to endorse an effective self‐monitoring and evaluation process before mandatory compliance measures are imposed by regulatory authorities from outside the industry.