Paper short abstract:

Evidence of territorial changes in the environmental history of the Balearic Islands helps to diagnosing future scenarios: e.g. luxury tourism vs. solidarity tourism, linking the objectives of environmental and social justice in terms of fair tourism degrowth.

Paper long abstract:

The recent environmental history of mass tourist destinations based on sun and beach model show trends of change due to the overlap of eco-social chronic crises: climate change, energy scarcity, biodiversity loss, desperate migratory flows, etc. The analysis of the Balearic case allows us to glimpse, at least, two future scenarios in this context: on the one hand, cap growth in terms of tourists flows but towards its elitization, through the redesign of the urban environment, so dealing to a process of gentrification; and on the other hand, the growing demand to apply regulatory frameworks that put a limit on the per capita throughput of energy, materials or water, in order to make tourism more sustainable and equitable. This last scenario is based on linking the objectives of environmental and social justice in terms of fair tourism degrowth.

Firstly, this contribution will present evidences of economic, social, environmental and territorial changes of the environmental history of the Balearic Islands, aimed to enrich the debate on the sustainability of tourism. Secondly, the aim is to contribute to the diagnosis of the pros and cons of both future scenarios, which are already put into practice in case studies, e.g., in terms of luxury tourism, on the one hand, and social and solidarity tourism, on the other.