The assessment of sustainable tourism: Application to Spanish coastal destinations Francisco Javier Blancas a, *, Mercedes Gonza ´ lez b , Macarena Lozano-Oyola a , Fa ´ tima Pe ´ rez b a Economics, Cuantitative Methods & Economic History Department, Pablo de Olavide University, Ctra. Utrera, km 1, 41013 Seville, Spain b Department of Applied Economics (Mathematics), University of Malaga, Campus El Ejido, 29071 Malaga, Spain 1. Introduction Sustainable development became one of the main objectives in many economic sectors after the publication of the Brundtland Report by the World Commission on Environment and Develop- ment (United Nations) in 1987. Five years later, the United Nations’ Conference on Environment and Development (the Earth Summit) was held in Rio de Janeiro in an attempt to consolidate a worldwide strategy based on sustainable development models. However, the tourism sector did not adopt the objective of sustainable development until 1997 after the Special Assembly of the United Nations known as ‘‘Rı ´o + 5’’. Although in this meeting sustainable tourism was set as a global target for the sector, the international literature does not provide an accurate and widely accepted definition of this concept. The definition provided by the World Tourism Organization (WTO) was inspired by the Brundt- land Report and defines sustainable tourism as that which ‘‘meets the needs of tourists and host regions, while at the same time it protects and improves opportunities for the future. It focuses on the management of all the resources in such a way that all economic, social, and aesthetic needs are met while cultural integrity, key ecological processes, biodiversity, and life support systems are respected’’ (World Tourism Organization, 1993). This definition shows that, although there is some debate regarding the concept, the path to follow is clear (Clarke, 1997; Hardy et al., 2002). Thus, it is necessary to develop tourism policies that guarantee the protection of natural, social and cultural resources and ensure that these resources can meet the needs of current and future residents and tourists (Sharpley, 2000; Liu, 2003). In line with this new paradigm, government policies for tourism planning aim for a model of tourism based on diversity, quality and sustainability that can improve the competitiveness of destina- tions. During the process of designing and implementing such policies, indicators of sustainable tourism can help to evaluate destinations and to define more suitable policies. In this study, the indicator system is understood as a set of measurements used to provide data that would help to better understand links with the industry and impacts on natural and cultural environments. Each component of the system evaluates an aspect of sustainability; these can be taken into account individually or together with the rest of the system. Since the 1990s, research has mainly focused on defining indicators in developing destinations (Farsari and Prastacos, 2002); there are fewer studies measuring and applying such systems to established destinations (Vera and Ivars, 2003). Indicator systems used in planning have to be able to summarize information in order to facilitate decision-making by the agents involved. Synthetic indicators are widely used for this task and are defined as mathematical pools or aggregations of the indicators that represent different dimensions of the Ecological Indicators 10 (2010) 484–492 ARTICLE INFO Article history: Received 29 April 2009 Received in revised form 3 August 2009 Accepted 4 August 2009 Keywords: Sustainable tourism Coastal destinations Synthetic indicators ABSTRACT This paper introduces an indicator system to evaluate sustainability in established coastal tourism destinations, applying the recommendations and definitions of the World Tourism Organization (WTO). We also develop a new synthetic indicator to simplify the measurement of sustainability and facilitate the comparative analysis of destination ranking. This measurement was obtained by applying a procedure to reduce the number of subjective decisions made by the analyst, using a novel two-stage aggregation methodology based on principal component analysis and on the distance to a reference point. The synthetic indicator obtained was applied to Spanish coastal destinations, and the results serve as a guideline for tourism planning. The conclusions of this research can be extrapolated to the study of other tourism destinations. ß 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. * Corresponding author. Tel.: +34 954349279. E-mail address: fjblaper@upo.es (F.J. Blancas). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Ecological Indicators journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ecolind 1470-160X/$ – see front matter ß 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.ecolind.2009.08.001