Dear Colleagues,

Sustainable tourism depends on people’s wellbeing and the health of the planet. Human–Environmental Relations: Promoting Sustainable Tourism is an important topic that continues to attract significant attention from scholars, tourism businesses, destination marketers and managers, policymakers, tourists and the host community. This Special Issue is focussed on innovative contributions that can contribute to promote human bonds with environmental settings. It focuses on providing healthy and safe places to promote the wellbeing and quality of life of both the host and guest and safeguard our planet, which provides the resources on which tourism is sustained.

The Special Issue seeks contributions discussing state-of-the-art theories, conceptual papers with innovative reflections and research agendas, and methodological and empirical contributions. The aim is to provide a comprehensive and futuristic approach to promoting sustainable tourism, addressing the global environmental challenges caused by over-tourism, including deleterious impacts at nature-based and cultural tourism sites, climate change, biodiversity loss, the scarcity of land and oceans as a consequence of excessive tourism infrastructure, pollution, and other threats to host and guest health and the tourism experience.

Understanding how tourism can positively and negatively impact our health and the planet’s health is increasingly critical for many tourism professionals and across disciplines of research and teaching. Tourism practitioners will gain a solid grounding in the existing and emerging challenges and the best practices for confronting challenges in safeguarding the planet’s resources and people’s wellbeing. This may promote more sustainable forms of tourism. Tourism practitioners and other co-actors, tourists, and the host community will become more familiar with how the consequences of uncontrolled tourism affect our health and wellbeing and negatively impact planetary health. Fostering human–environmental bonds contributes to quality of life, promoting sustainable tourism; this aligns with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (Ramkissoon, 2020a; Ramkissoon et al., 2013). It is crucial for the tourism industry to consider how to promote attachment to environmental settings. The challenge is to achieve long-term behavioural change (Ramkissoon 2020b) in businesses and consumers regarding place. Through stakeholder engagement, policymakers, individuals, communities, and tourism businesses, the host and guest could work together to help to minimize and mitigate the negative environmental impacts on our planet and promote a cleaner and safer tourism industry for our present and future generations.

References:

Ramkissoon, H. (2020a). Perceived social impacts of tourism and quality-of-life: a new conceptual model. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 1-17.

Ramkissoon, H. (2020b). COVID-19 place confinement, pro-social, pro-environmental behaviors, and residents’ wellbeing: A new conceptual framework. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 2248.

Ramkissoon, H., Smith, L.D.G., and Weiler, B. (2013). Testing the dimensionality of place attachment and its relationships with place satisfaction and pro-environmental behaviours: A structural equation modelling approach. Tourism management, 36, 552-566.

Goal:

The goal of this Special Issue is to provide an open access resource to educate businesses and communities about incorporating sustainable behaviours protecting our planet’s resources, and empowering communities to improve the social, environmental, and economic impacts of tourism.

Contribution to literature:

The Special Issue on Human–Environmental Relations: Promoting Sustainable Tourism will contribute to the theoretical discourse on sustainable tourism. Contributions are called for in the form of original and scholarly research articles, conceptual and empirical papers, review articles, and commentaries on people–environment bonds and their contribution to sustainable tourism. The Special Issue welcomes the full range of previously unpublished scholarly communications indicated within the journal’s aims (https://0-www-mdpi-com.brum.beds.ac.uk/journal/sustainability/about). The journal has a policy of having no restrictions on the overall length of the paper; Section Editors will expect academic communications to be concise, clear, and readable. Authors are advised to make full use of “supplementary material” in their submissions.

Prof. Dr. Haywantee Ramkissoon
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• sustainable tourism
• environment
• planetary health
• place attachment
• human health and wellbeing
• stakeholder engagement