Environmental and Social Impact Assessment of Golf Tourism: A Social Participatory and Multicriteria-Based Process Applied in Southern Spain

Environmental and Social Impact Assessment is an extremely useful tool for identifying and evaluating the social and environmental repercussions of a wide range of projects. Especially when the project and its impacts are very complex, an ESIA can result in the identification of a high number of impacts needing to be prioritized in order to be addressed effectively and efficiently.

In recent decades, southern Spain has experienced an explosion of golf tourism. Favorable climate and a wide tourist offer of Andalusia has made a major golf destinations. However, the construction of the golf courses and the accompanying tourist developments are assuming enormous pressure to local ecosystems suffering environmental, social and economic. Although an strategic planning for reduction of risk and impacts is needed in the studied area, it is also necessary, and urgent, taking decisions in order to restore the balance socioeconomic and environmental

 This paper shows the main results from a methodological proposal for the assessement of impacts within an ESIA based on participatory and social justice criteria applied on a golf-based tourism project in Huelva (Spain). This methodological approach is structured into four main phases: 1) Creating the stakeholders’ platform; 2) Preliminary identification and assessment of impacts; 3) Categorizing and reducing the selection of impacts; 4) Assessing and prioritizing impacts using MCDA.