Spatial planning framework, a challenge for marine tourism development: location of diving parks on Rhodes island, Greece

摘要

Dive tourism has been growing constantly in recent years, contributing to socio-economic development of coastal zones and islands. In Greece new users are attracted, while coastal communities seek to create marine infrastructure, such as diving parks. Within this context, this paper deals with issues of diving park location. More specifically, it attempts to propose a methodology by identifying marine typologies and classify them according to specific criteria favourable or not to the location of diving parks. Rhodes island is chosen for the empirical part of the study, since the island's local economy is based on sea tourism. Marine typologies are identified based on selected criteria, and the marine space is classified according to favourable characteristics of the location of the diving park. The results indicate that, due to the significant human-induced activities in the marine environment, the potential dive locations are significantly reduced, underlining the risk of sea use conflicts and emerging the need of MSP implementation.