Fonte: El Periplo Sustentable; Núm. 39 (2020): Número Treinta y nueve; 7 - 30
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Resumo: Sustainable development is a process that needs to be monitored and evaluated through indicators and indexes, its selection and application depends on the objective of the research, as well as the study area. In Mexico, the Natural Protected Areas (NPA) represent one of the main destinations for ecotourism activities, an example is Parque Nacional Bahía de Loreto (PNBL). The application of management policies and regulations in the NPA requires updated information about the sustainable status of the system. In this sense, one of the aims of this study was to conduct a review of the systems of indicators and indexes that have been proposed to evaluate the sustainability of tourism in NPA. As a second goal, a model is proposed to evaluate the sustainability of tourism in the PNBL, composed of two indexes. The first one based on a multivariate statistical analysis to evaluate the destination's tendency towards the reach of sustainability within a time period; four dimensions were selected: socioeconomic, tourist, environmental and technological. The second index focuses on perceptions based on the community residents’ perceptions, tourist companies and tourists; the indicators were classified in social and environmental dimension. The proposed model will evaluate the sustainability of an NPA with tourist use in a new and integral method, considering all the components involved in the goals of sustainable tourism. Both objective and subjective indicators application offer an advantage over other indexes, since it considers the opinion of the sectors involved in addition to the hard data generated through monitoring and censuses. The indexes proposed here will allow identifying problems or risks, as well as redefining and creating new targets for the PNBL Management Program.