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Coastal and marine tourism is an important sector in Europe and includes activities related to the establishment and running of infrastructure as well as to accommodation, transport and retail sale of goods/other expenditure. More specifically tourist expenditure in those sub-sectors is associated to beach and coastal-based activities, such as swimming and coasteering, and water-based or sport-type activities, such as sailing, scuba-diving, recreational fishing, cruising and marine wildlife watching.

In the EU-27, coastal and maritime tourism generated EUR 49.8 billion in GVA and employed over 1.9 million people in 2021. The sector is showing signs of recovery after the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak and associated travel restrictions (Table 1).

Table 1: EU coastal and maritime activities - Extraction of non-living resources: number of people employed, Gross Value Added (GVA), past trends (2008-2021) and expected trends (2022-2024).

Pressures on the marine environment

Marine and coastal tourism depends to large extent on maintaining the health and resilience of the marine environment so that people can continue to enjoy and use it. Tourism, however, exerts numerous serious pressures on the environment, as it leads to the building of infrastructures and to intense use of the sea by people. Marine and coastal tourism also causes other significant effects in hinterland such as high consumption of natural resources (e.g. water, food, space) and increase of prices (e.g. real estate, food).

The pressures imposed on the marine environment by this activity include:

  • Physical loss and disturbance of the seabed as well as  fragmentation of natural habitats is related to building infrastructure (e.g. marinas and ports) at sea and in the hinterland and related tourism activities, such as bathing, diving, angling, sailing/anchoring, boating, anchoring of cruise ships. Coastal development for tourism increasingly limits habitat and species distribution.
  • Introduction of underwater noise is related to operation of ships and other vessels. Infrastructure construction in coastal area causes short term emissions of impulsive underwater noise during construction phase.
  • Eutrophication can be aggravated in the sensitive areas due to increase in wastewater emissions.
  • Contamination is related to spills and discharges of oil and toxic chemicals (e.g antifouling substances) from recreational boats and the cruise industry.
  • Marine Litter is emitted to coastal and marine environment from all tourist activities.

References

  1. EC, 2019. The EU Blue Economy Report 2019. Publications Office of the European Union. Luxembourg.
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  2. EC, 2020a. The EU Blue Economy Report 2020. Publications Office of the European Union. Luxembourg.
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  3. European Commission, Directorate-General for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries, Joint Research Centre, Borriello, A., Calvo Santos, A., Codina López, L. et al., The EU blue economy report 2024, Publications Office of the European Union, 2024,
    https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2771/186064
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  4. Korpinen, S., Klančnik, K., Peterlin, M., Nurmi, M., Laamanen, L., Zupančič, G., Popit, A., Murray, C., Harvey, T., Andersen, J.H.,Zenetos, A., Stein, U., Tunesi, L., Abhold, K., Piet, G., Kallenbach, E., Agnesi, S., Bolman, B., Vaughan, D., Reker, J. & Royo Gelabert,E., 2019, Multiple pressures and their combined effects in Europe’s seas. ETC/ICM Technical Report 4/2019: European Topic Centre on Inland, Coastal and Marine waters, 164 pp. (
    https://www.eionet.europa.eu/etcs/etc-icm/products/etc-icm-report-4-2019-multiple-pressures-and-their-combined-effects-in-europes-seas)
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