From tourism pressure to overtourism vulnerability regimes: A municipal impact assessment framework for sustainable destination governance

Overtourism is increasingly understood as a multidimensional sustainability challenge, yet local decision-makers still lack replicable tools for assessing where tourism pressure may translate into territorial vulnerability. This paper develops a municipal impact-assessment framework for diagnosing overtourism vulnerability regimes. The analysis follows a two-step logic. First, a regional tourism-pressure screening index is constructed for Euro-Mediterranean NUTS-2 regions to identify broader high-pressure contexts. Second, an Overtourism Vulnerability Index (OVI) is implemented for the main tourism hotspots in Apulia, Italy, using eight normalized indicators capturing direct tourism pressure, air accessibility, accommodation platformisation, economic dependence and heritage attractiveness. Rather than treating the OVI as a ranking device, the framework decomposes vulnerability into three diagnostic dimensions: direct pressure, structural fragility and gateway/heritage amplification. These dimensions identify four regimes: critical overload and fragility, gateway/heritage pressure, coastal fragility and platformisation, and monitor-and-prevent contexts. Robustness checks and an external waste-based plausibility check support the diagnostic interpretation. The resulting toolbox links each regime to assessment, monitoring and candidate intervention priorities, helping planners move from regional pressure screening to municipal scoping and targeted environmental and carrying-capacity assessment.