Sustainable tourism and the validity of environmental Kuznets Curve for tourism in Turkey

Tourism is an industry that wastes environment. It affects not only natural sources but also other fields like culture and history.Tourism with its feature of making foreign currency and creating employements supplies important contributions to regional, global and national economies. It affects national income, employement, capital investment and tax revenue directly and indirectly. It is a sector which can solve the unemployment problem of Turkey in a short time.Tourism plays an important role on financing of industry and foreign trade in most of developing countries because of its feature of making foreign currency. In recent years, tourism has became more important on the local and regional levels. It creates high interest on economy of regions in which tourism developed and it contributes to value of tourism because of supporting other sectors, foreign currency rate in Gross National Product (GNP), exports and employment created by tourism.The argument is that how we can develop the sector which can be benefited by everyone with saving and developing and passing to the next generations indispensible values like nature, climate, environment, culture, history and folklore. Developed west countries, instead of selling and consuming of usable data and factors to the recent generations they intend to make them use limitedly and sell them restrictedly for carrying to the next generation. With this aspect, data and factors that material of tourism will be in indispensable necessity of human being as the world stand.On the process of full membership of European Union, Turkey will be more developed and will make its exact development level closer to the European countries and its exact developement will be beter than the condition that Turkey is in at the moment. For a sustainable development, elements of development sources must be sustainable too. In this matter sustainable tourism affects development , development affects sustainable tourism. The consept that explains this matter is Kuznets Curve Hypothesis.The analysis we make in the region where tourism is more developed it has been proved that in the places that regional developement increased and regional developement provide protection of tourism sources and so developement directly contributes sustainable tourism.Through the process of development, in the countries which have high natural, cultural and historical quality from the point of employment share and resource consumption, tourism is at a very important position. In the process of development, improvement of the income distribution positively affects the tourism sector, thus this will also obtain more development in tourism sector. But, in this process, the consumption of environment has been accelerating. While the development in tourism is accelerating, the destruction of environment is increasing, too. According to Environmental Kuznets Curve Hypothesis at the early stages of economic development, especially in the areas which have intensive tourism activities, environmental destruction does not endure persistently. While tourism sector is progressing, economy gets a structural transformation and tends to knowledge-intensive sector and services. Increasing environmental sensitivity, enforcing environmental settings, better technologies and higher degree environmental consumptions accompany to these advancements. These interdependent advancements cause the reversing the tendency through the destruction of environment, on the other hand, cause improvement of distorted environment in the early periods of tourism growth. So, this improvement in environment increases the development in tourism. Thusly, the conclusion reached in the thesis gives us reliable estimation that; for Turkey and Antalya there is a condition analogous with Environmental Kuznets Curve is possible to say.