Spatial Analysis of Tourism Pressure on Coastal and Marine Ecosystem Services

Coastal and marine environments generate a multiplicity of Ecosystem Services (ESs) critical to humanity. The study provides a partial estimate of the tourism pression on ESs in coastal municipalities in the South of Italy. It develops a series of tests to understand the existence of correlations between the tourist penetration rates (TPR) of each municipality and the tourist extra pressure recorded in municipal solid waste (MSW) production and drinking water consumption in the reference year. The relative results return positive and significant relationships in both cases, but the correlation is higher in the association between TPR and MSW. Further tests substitute tourist density rate (TDR) for TPR, but the variables result non-correlation. Coastal municipalities experience greater increases in tourist pressure on the anthropic and ecological component because of large tourist inflows. Moreover, tourist extra pressure is more than proportional in demographically smaller municipalities.