Barriers to sustainable tourism development and their environmental impacts: an analytical study in Mosul tourist forests

Abstract

It would be useful to analyze the impediments to sustainable tourism development and their ecological consequences in the environmentally important Mosul Forest tourist location. To research the relationships among the dimensions of sustainable tourism development barriers (administrative and organizational, environmental and planning, financial and investment, socio-cultural), this paper adopted theoretical models of myths. The aim was to evaluate their environmental impacts in terms of vegetation destruction and air pollution; pressure on natural resources due to artificial activities such as mining or farming that produce and therefore need pollutants; as well as threats against biodiversity from human encroachment into natural habitats, which eventually leads up the food chain as ever more deadly forms. There are many impediments to sustainable tourism development in Mosul Forest, and significant environmental impacts. At a significance level of 0.01 (noiz), significant positive correlations and impact relationships exist between all barrier dimensions and environmental impacts. Conversely, regression analysis revealed that environmental and planning problems had the greatest impact on environmental destruction, followed by administrative and organizational obstacles, then financial and investment roadblocks. At the same time, socio-cultural barriers showed a comparatively lower but still significant effect. It leads to a model of analysis that, for the very first time, sets forth the relationships between barriers to sustainable tourism development and environmental impacts in a forest tourism scenario. Proposal: Integrated environmental tourism planning should be promoted. In this way, sustainable tourism governance can be strengthened by more effectively leveraging flattering material in the design of environmental investments; a Greener Environment Award of sorts might also help promote overseas capital inflows into environmentally sound enterprises.