Evaluating the issue of sustainable tourism with a system dynamic approach: evidence from Uttarakhand, India

Sustainable tourism is a dynamic, complex system in which continuous interaction between economic, social, and environmental components will take place. The complexity of the system occurs because of nonlinear interactions between these components. Further, in a dynamic condition, econometric models based on historical data will not provide a realistic solution. However, the plan towards achieving tourism sustainability is mostly based on the past behaviour of heterogeneous factors and assumes that these factors will behave in the same way in the future as well. This approach is inefficient for understanding the underlying structure of the complex system and fails to address the issue of sustainability in a feasible way. Therefore, the present study addresses the issue of sustainable tourism using a system dynamic approach for Mussoorie, India. The results of the study reveal that the existing tourism policy is more in favour of enhancement of tourism at the cost of degrading air quality through increase in carbon emissions, loss of water spring bodies, increase in noise pollution, over exploitation of natural resources and reflecting the myopic approach of the existing policy. This study confirms that the existing approach will emasculate the objective of sustainable tourism.