Baños, C.J.; Hernández, M.; Rico, A.M.; Olcina, J. The Hydrosocial Cycle in Coastal Tourist Destinations in Alicante, Spain: Increasing Resilience to Drought. Sustainability2019, 11, 4494.
Baños, C.J.; Hernández, M.; Rico, A.M.; Olcina, J. The Hydrosocial Cycle in Coastal Tourist Destinations in Alicante, Spain: Increasing Resilience to Drought. Sustainability 2019, 11, 4494.
Baños, C.J.; Hernández, M.; Rico, A.M.; Olcina, J. The Hydrosocial Cycle in Coastal Tourist Destinations in Alicante, Spain: Increasing Resilience to Drought. Sustainability2019, 11, 4494.
Baños, C.J.; Hernández, M.; Rico, A.M.; Olcina, J. The Hydrosocial Cycle in Coastal Tourist Destinations in Alicante, Spain: Increasing Resilience to Drought. Sustainability 2019, 11, 4494.
Abstract
Tourism, and particularly residential tourism, has led to a change in the urban and demographic model of towns along the European Mediterranean coastline. Water as a limited and limiting resource for the growth of tourism is a popular topic in the scientific literature. However, the incorporation of non-conventional resources (desalination) has meant, in theory, that this limitation has been overcome. The aims of this paper are: a) to identify the different tourism models implanted in this territory and describe them from the point of view of their consumption of water in the demand cycle from 2002 to 2017; b) analyse the hydrosocial cycle, highlighting the measures aimed at satisfying water demand; and c) identify the limitations associated with these hydrosocial systems. To this end, different types of information will be processed, and various complex indicators produced. The results show the importance that demand management and the use of desalinated water in increasing the resilience of this territory to aridity. However, this has generated other problems associated with a tsunami of construction and the continuity of a non-sustainable territorial model.
Keywords
water consumption; water metabolism; tourism destination; resilience; non-conventional water resources; sustainable tourism; overtourism; shortage; Spain
Subject
Social Sciences, Geography, Planning and Development
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.