Tourism, through its components, can be found in all areas that relate to sustainable development principles. Although it should be encouraged due to the multiplier effect that it has in the development of a region, it creates pressure on the surrounding environment like any other economic activity in the process of specific potential capitalization. This paper is aimed at determining the degree of tourism pressure, its trend and impact on tourism's sustainable development and the Romanian economy. When this pressure exceeds the ecological support capacity, negative effects occur, both on the landscape in general, and on certain tourist objectives, in particular. The assessment of this pressure and its most accurate quantification imply the use, calculation, correlation and interpolation of indicators that may summarize certain aspects related to the density of tourist fittings, tourist traffic intensity and capitalization level. Hence, the approach would be considered regionally and in terms of tourism pressure dynamics, depending on the structure of available statistical data, as well as to get a clearer picture. The authors used methods specific to geography, as well as statistical and econometric methods. The interdependence between tourism, tourism pressure and sustainability is described in the Central region. The results and observations determined with reference to the factors and indicators shown underlie the coordination of the tourism activity in the other regions according to the processes of sustainability and tourism pressure mitigation.

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The touristic regionalization, in most cases, is performed by taking into account the tourism potential as main reference, in this respect numerous methodologies having attempted to quantify as balanced as possible both the natural tourism potential and the man-made one. Beyond its great theoretical importance, their actual, practical and statistical value is yet limited, given that all economic and socio-political analyses, reports and comparisons have a mandatory administrative dimension, too. These present realities constitute the main reason why we believe that a deepening of regionalization which takes into consideration, more than others made so far, the administrative component, on the one hand, and the actual revaluation, on the other hand, embodied in the existence of specific infrastructure, which together with the tourism potential shall determine the attraction of tourist flows. In this respect, we tried to consider, to share and to model a large number of indicators to reach an outcome which provides a more real, synthetic and complete image (8 data sets were structured and combined, calculating 13 indicators, subsequently synthesized into 5, which led to the preparation of maps: afterwards these were overlapped for county level, respectively their average at the level of development regions. Such a regionalization also reflects the real role that tourism plays in the economic balance of counties, respectively development regions.

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