Key Insights from the Environmental Carrying Capacity Masterclass
A December 2025 masterclass hosted by Murmuration and Low Season Traveller brought together tourism professionals to explore how environmental carrying capacity can address the growing challenge of overtourism.
The conversation around overtourism has intensified in recent years, with destinations worldwide grappling with the question of how many visitors they can sustainably accommodate. At the recent Environmental Carrying Capacity Masterclass, industry experts unpacked this complex challenge and presented data-driven solutions for managing tourism more responsibly.
The Core Question: How Many Tourists is Too Many?
Ged Brown from Low Season Traveller opened the session by highlighting a pressing issue that has emerged from recent Tourism Seasonality Summits: peak tourism periods are under increasing pressure. “How many tourists is your destination built for?” Brown asked, emphasizing that destinations need to understand their environmental limits – from fresh water supply and air quality to waste disposal capacity.
“If you don’t understand that figure, then really that’s quite an irresponsible thing to do to keep attracting more tourists,” Brown stated, setting the stage for why environmental carrying capacity studies have become essential.
Understanding Carrying Capacity: From Theory to Practice
Tarek Habib from Murmuration, a French data analytics company specializing in tourism, explained that the concept of tourism carrying capacity dates back to a 1981 UNWTO report. The original definition focused on the maximum number of people who could visit a destination without causing destructive impacts on physical, economic, and sociocultural environments, while maintaining visitor satisfaction.
However, Habib noted that this definition has evolved. “What is missing from this is the locals actually, the local population and how they feel about this because they are also actors in this,” he explained.
Today’s understanding recognizes three levels of carrying capacity:
- Physical Capacity: The theoretical maximum based on available space
- Real Carrying Capacity: Physical capacity adjusted for environmental and regulatory constraints
- Effective Carrying Capacity: Real capacity further adjusted for management infrastructure and services
Why Environment Comes First
The masterclass emphasized that environmental carrying capacity is foundational to all tourism activity. “If the environment is not okay, you don’t have a product. You don’t have a destination,” Habib stressed. This principle applies across all tourism types, from mountain and snow tourism to coastal destinations.
He cited the example of Maya Beach in Thailand, where coral reef degradation from overtourism forced authorities to shut down the destination to allow for environmental recovery. The message was clear: without proper environmental management, destinations risk losing the very assets that attract visitors.
Slovenia’s Data-Driven Approach
Anna from Slovenia Tourism Board shared her country’s experience implementing an environmental carrying capacity framework. “You cannot manage what you do not measure,” she explained, describing why Slovenia embarked on this project.
The country wanted to better understand environmental limits, support sustainable destination management, and create a concrete data-driven basis for long-term planning. The project has now become part of Slovenia’s National Intelligence System for Tourism, launched in June 2025.
The Three-Pronged Measurement Approach
Habib outlined three essential measurement categories for assessing carrying capacity:
- The “Vibe Check” (Socio-psychological indicators): Measuring friction points between tourists and locals, tracking visitor flows and hotspots
- The “Health Check” (Biophysical indicators): Assessing environmental health including air and water quality, biodiversity, and land use
- The “Assets Check” (Human infrastructure): Evaluating waste processing capacity, power stations, and water availability
The Power of Remote Sensing Technology
A key revelation from the masterclass was the role of satellite data in measuring environmental carrying capacity. Murmuration utilizes data from the Copernicus program, a publicly funded European initiative that has provided satellite imagery since 2015 and is funded through 2035.
“It’s a very nice time travel machine,” Habib described, explaining how satellite archives allow researchers to track environmental changes over 30 years and project future trends. This technology provides spatially distributed data at a 10-meter resolution, enabling precise monitoring of land cover changes, air pollution, water availability, and ecosystem health.
The Slovenia Dashboard: Bringing Data to Life
Habib demonstrated the interactive dashboard Murmuration created for Slovenia Tourism Board, which calculates environmental carrying capacity for 21 municipalities (with expansion underway). The tool provides:
- Overall environmental carrying capacity scores for each municipality
- Monthly tracking to identify overuse and untapped opportunities
- Detailed land cover evolution mapping
- Air pollution monitoring with health-impact indicators
- Water availability modeling that disaggregates tourism consumption from domestic, industrial, and irrigation demands
- Vegetation health indices that account for drought and temperature impacts
The dashboard allows destination managers to compare municipalities and identify where environmental pressures are most acute. For instance, the comparison between different Slovenian municipalities revealed stark contrasts in carrying capacity, with some hosting seven times more tourists while showing significantly lower environmental carrying capacity scores.
Finding the Sweet Spot
The masterclass emphasized that the goal isn’t simply to limit tourism but to find the optimal balance. “Too few tourists, you’re missing opportunities. You have economic stagnation,” Habib explained. “While too many tourists, you have nuisance to locals and you have environmental cost.”
Seasonal variations emerged as a crucial factor. Water pressure, for example, peaks dramatically during summer months but normalizes during shoulder seasons, revealing underutilized capacity. “People can actually enjoy the destination usually in very similar conditions as you can have during the summer, even better conditions, but it’s underdeveloped,” Habib noted.
Turning Data into Action
So how can destinations use carrying capacity data practically? Habib outlined several applications:
- Engaging the entire tourism stakeholder chain
- Providing transparent public information to locals and tourists
- Educational purposes to explain limits and benefits
- Setting development thresholds, such as restricting new hotel construction until water capacity expands
- Identifying opportunities in underdeveloped areas with adequate environmental capacity
The Challenges Ahead
Despite the promise of environmental carrying capacity studies, Habib acknowledged several challenges: lack of historical data in many destinations, the need for scalability from local to national levels, seasonality variations, and the reality that environmental limits themselves change over time.
The question of creating a global carrying capacity register sparked discussion during the Q&A session. While Habib expressed enthusiasm for the idea, he cautioned that such a resource would require careful governance to ensure data is accessible and understandable to appropriate audiences. “We need to make sure that if we are putting an open registry somewhere or a global carrying capacity registry somewhere, it’s accessible to the right people with the right amount of information and understanding,” he explained.
A Global Perspective
Murmuration has already created a national-scale environmental carrying capacity map covering destinations worldwide, though Habib emphasized its limitations for large countries like the US, Canada, or India. “If we want to have an operational measure of carrying capacity that is used in managing a destination, we need to focus quite closely on specific destinations and specific spots,” he concluded.
Looking Forward
As Brown noted in his closing remarks, tourism was not historically constrained by capacity issues. “We never had to really focus as much on this because it wasn’t a problem,” he reflected. But with global tourism projected to double in the next 15 to 20 years, environmental carrying capacity management has become essential.
Perhaps the balance isn’t something we find, but something we create…
“What you guys are doing is absolutely at the cutting edge,” Brown told the Murmuration team. “It is so important that destinations around the world really do understand all of these critical factors.”
The masterclass made clear that the era of unlimited tourism growth is ending. The future belongs to destinations that can harness data, understand their environmental limits, and find that sweet spot where tourism benefits communities, protects the environment, and delivers quality experiences for visitors.
The Environmental Carrying Capacity Masterclass was hosted by Murmuration and Low Season Traveller in December 2025, bringing together tourism professionals from around the globe, including participants joining from Canada in the early morning hours.
Tarek will be providing a keynote at the Tourism Seasonality Summit in Rimini on 17-18 May 2026.
A recording of the masterclass can be found here:
