Band 5+: Tourism is one of the fastest growing industries and contributes a great deal to economies around the world. However, the damage tourism can cause to local cultures and the environment is often ignored. To what extent do you agree or disagree?

Nowadays, tourism became the most economically lucrative industry in the world. Nevertheless, the repercussions of it are usually disruptive according to environmental and local culture areas, which makes it not an ordinary issue between various groups of people. However, it is my conviction that it is necessary to reveal all factors, namely pros and cons of tourism, to correctly answer the question.

Primarily, on the one hand, problems when tourists damage the environment or stifle a local culture are extremely widespread. For instance, there is a large number of Chinese tourists in Kazakhstan and France, which causes a mammoth incorporation of their culture there; consequently, there are issues for the aforementioned countries to keep their culture in major. Namely, I assume that eating Chinese food can substitute eating French or Kazakhstan food. Apart from that, usually tourists tend to the disrespectful behavior towards a country where they arrived. For example, there are many Arabic tourists in Europe, and on account of their number, they left many rubbish on the streets, which damages the environment.

However, on the other hand, there are many benefits that can outweigh tourists’ damage on the given areas. For example, some statistics refer to a risen number of investments in visited countries in view of tourism. For instance, Germany earned more than 1 billion euros from tourists in 2017; and using these costs country can pay for all damage that tourists did for its environment. Moreover, speaking about pressure on local culture, root inhabitants of different countries understood how to prevent the attempts of neglecting their cultures. Namely, in Ukraine and Moldova there is a number of Russian tourists, but I conjecture that it is not an obstacle due to cohesion between Ukrainians and Moldovans to preserve their culture.

In a nutshell, referring to the presented arguments, it seems to me that predominantly the damage to the given areas isn’t ignored. Furthermore, many countries tend to develop themselves, and I assume without tourism they can’t do that in view of costs. Hence, different countries found various ways of solving the issue, and I fully disagree with a given assertion.