Carrying Capacity Calculator

Determining the carrying capacity is essential for the sustainable management of tourism destinations and public urban spaces, balancing environmental, economic, social, and experiential factors. Carrying capacity helps minimize environmental impact by limiting visitor numbers to levels that do not degrade natural resources and ecosystems, thereby preserving biodiversity and heritage sites. Economically, it ensures long-term viability by preventing resource overuse, which can lead to economic downturns if destinations become less attractive due to degradation. Socially, it maintains the quality of life for local residents by avoiding overcrowding and overuse of public services and infrastructure, while also protecting local cultures from being overwhelmed by excessive tourism or events.

Visitor experience is enhanced through carrying capacity management, ensuring positive experiences free from issues like long wait times, traffic congestion, and insufficient facilities, and maintaining safety standards to prevent accidents and hazards. Additionally, it guides sustainable infrastructure development and maintenance, preventing overburdening and managing costs associated with repairing overused facilities.

Carrying capacity informs regulatory and planning efforts, aiding policymakers in creating effective regulations and guidelines, and assisting urban planners and event managers in designing spaces that can sustainably accommodate intended visitor numbers. It provides a feedback mechanism for continuous monitoring and adaptive management strategies to address emerging issues, enabling data-driven decisions that enhance sustainability.

This tool is a web application to visualize and calculate walkable outdoor areas, and the 3 stages of Tourism Carrying Capacity (TCC). The application is an extension of the geojson.io tool, allowing a user to select GeoJSON areas over a map, and calculate the walkable area inside those geometries using OpenStreetMap (OSM) open georeferenced data and Turf.js geoprocessing library. The obtained walkable area is then used to calculate the carrying capacity levels, given user input. 

The core calculations of the application are run locally, needing only to fetch OSM data. The use of Web Workers API allows the parallel use of multiple CPU cores for faster calculations, making the web app very scalable.