AN APPROACH TO MONITORING AND EVALUATING THE ENVIRONMENTAL PERFORMANCE OF AUSTRALIAN BEACH RESORTS

Tourism, in Australia and globally, is a growth industry. With this gr owth has come concern for the implications of tourism for resources an d for people exposed to the periodic influx of visitors. As a result, the tourism industry has experienced increased scrutiny in regard to e nvironmental management and efforts are being made to achieve more sus tainable forms of tourism development. Reflecting this trend, a number of beach resorts along the Australian coast are now being designed an d operated on ecologically sensitive lines, and there is increasing ev idence that tourism developers are seeking effective ways of monitorin g and evaluating their environmental performance. Environmental auditi ng is seen as a useful approach for determining the extent to which co astal resorts are in compliance with regulatory requirements and envir onmental standards and policies. In this paper, a conceptual and syste matic framework and procedures for an environmental auditing program, within which a series of activities can be carried out and decisions m ade, are presented. These, then, help define a set of desired conditio ns and the management actions necessary to maintain or restore those c onditions. The need to improve the process of monitoring and evaluatin g the environmental performance of tourism development, and to incorpo rate the results of such monitoring and evaluation into decision-makin g processes, will become even more crucial in the future. The challeng e facing Australian tourism development is to endorse an effective sel f-monitoring and evaluation process before mandatory compliance measur es are imposed by regulatory authorities from outside the industry.