Cooperation, hotspots and prospects for tourism environmental impact assessments

This study aims to identify hot spots, research limitations and future research directions in tourism environmental impact assessment (TEIA). We analyzed studies from the core database of Web of Science (WoS) based on their coauthorship, keyword co-occurrence and timeline with VOSviewer and CiteSpace. It was found that China, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Spain are the major contributors to TEIA, and relatively stable cooperative groups have been formed among the authors. Research hotspots in the past 20 years mainly include: the impact of tourism activities in different tourist destinations on the environment, the approaches to assess the impact of tourism on the environment, and strategies on reducing the negative impact of tourism on the environment. We also found TEIA deficiency in the following five aspects: 1) insufficient studies on macro decision-making; 2) insufficient dynamic interaction analysis; 3) insufficient tourism heat footprint research; 4) insufficient studies on the positive effects of tourism on the environment; and 5) insufficient interdisciplinary innovation. Based on the findings, we suggest that 1) further studies be conducted on tourism activity type, time scale, macro pattern, environmental process and policy effect of tourism impact assessment with more variables and factors considered; 2) the impact of different types of tourism on each subsystem of the environment and the paths of the interaction among subsystems be explored from the perspective of system governance; 3) the study of thermal footprint generated by tourism activities be given more attention, especially large-scale tourism activities; 4) the positive impact of tourism activities on the ecological environment be studied, especially ecotourism; 5) the applicability of TEIA evaluation results be increased by means of interdisciplinary methods such as big data analysis.