Integrated Economic, Environmental and Social Index—Case Study: Medina of Tangier

Abstract

Assessing tourism sustainability has become of paramount importance to researchers and policymakers in regard to better protecting tourism destinations, particularly with the continued increase in the number of tourists and visitors who alter the natural components of the environment and degrade ecosystems. The use of geographic data is of great importance, as it can serve as a dashboard for monitoring and controlling the sustainability of tourist areas. Due to their diversity and abundance in the city of Tangier, these tools are available and easy to use. The medina of Tangier is used as a calculation example, a method that will also be applicable to other areas of the metropolitan city and to other cities as well. Based on the annual meeting of the different component of society involved in the Medina of Tangier, the data are extracted and integrated into the proposed model through a plugin interface. Therefore, the use of geographic data is of great importance, especially in environmental monitoring and land management, due to its ease of use and availability. However, calculating composite sustainability indices involves several steps and requires a basic understanding of existing models. This article describes the development and design of a plugin package in QGIS that serves as an easy-to-use tool to automatically process and calculate economic, environmental and social indices and the overall tourism sustainability index. These plugins were built in Python and designed as plugins for the QGIS software version 3.22.