Leisurescape: A Pan-European Spatial Assessment of Tourism between Cities, Nature and Landscape

Part of the project initiative Landscape and leisure, launched by the Dutch Government Advisor on the Landscape, is the development of a European map on the basis of a standard methodological approach for presenting the spatial relations between leisure and tourism on the one hand, and landscape and nature conservation other hand. Due to the increasing need of European institutions for harmonized, reliable data on the state and trends of the environment – and meanwhile on the allencompassing policy domain of sustainability which includes the social, economic and environmental dimension – the production of European data sets has become a key policy domain and the core business of a wide range of agencies at both the national and international level. Since the publication of the first pan-European state-of-the-environment report (Stanners & Bourdeau 1995), tourism has taken a steady place in international and national assessments, echoing its role as the fastest growing sector in Europe (EEA 2005). EU research and reporting activities on the environmental impacts of tourism focus mainly on issues such as waste management, traffic, energy or water consumption – with landscape being only randomly or not addressed.