The concept of ecological carrying capacity: current state and algorithm of assessment for different types of tourist areas

The concept of capacity, traditional for classical ecology, in the context of sustainable development has also been used to assess the prospects for the development of sustainable tourism in the territory, it is also included in the Strategy for the Development of Tourism in the Russian Federation for the period up to 2035. The main purpose of the article is to analyze the existing domestic and foreign approaches to the assessment of environmental capacity and to develop on their basis algorithms for assessing capacity for different tourist areas. The analysis of the transformation of the existing methods of assessing environmental capacity, used in Russian and foreign practice since the 1970s, allowed, first, to identify the similarities and differences of scientific and practical approaches to solving this problem, and secondly, to identify the most valuable developments of world practice that are relevant to the Russian reality. Modern ideas about carrying capacity indicate the flexibility and multivariance of this concept, its dependence on both the natural properties of the territory and the types of recreational activities, as well as the degree of satisfaction of the recreational expectations of the tourist. The article proposes a universal algorithm for determining the ecological capacity for different types of tourist areas, based on the assessment of its technogenic and recreational components. The division into two components is fundamental for the methodology, since technogenic capacity is largely regulated by various provisions of existing legislation (codes, regulations, sanitary norms and rules), the indicators of compliance with which are evaluated by normalization and assignment of expert points, and recreational capacity, to a greater extent, depends on the properties of the territory and recreational activities. Among the environmental factors determining tourism capacity factors relating to environmental risks (such as fire hazard, the entropy of the relief, the likelihood of adverse exogenous geodynamic processes), and factors influencing the environment-stabilizing potential of the area (urbanization, plowed, and their) are included in the assessment. The methodology is being tested for two types of tourist territories – the Kenozersky National Park and the Greater Yalta region.