An exploratory analysis of the negative environmental impacts of pandemic tourism on Canadian destinations

Abstract

The closure of national borders during the COVID-19 pandemic triggered domestic tourism travel demand to non-urban destinations. We show that this shift led to negative environmental impacts that we characterize in this paper for Canadian destinations. Based on a review of Canadian media content published during the pandemic, a total of 194 articles were identified, 22 of which reported 83 negative environmental impacts for 19 destinations. We obtain three main results. First, beach tourism was the source of most of the negative environmental impacts (78,9%). Second, the most common problems were associated with car use (36.1%) and waste disposal (36.1%). Third, 26.5% of the problems were caused by waste thrown into the environment. Policy implications are discussed in the conclusion.

Keywords

• Domestic tourism
• Overtourism
• Pandemic
• COVID-19
• Environmental impacts
• Canada