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Tourism is a major industry that can lead to economic gains as well as to degraded environment and social infrastructure. Tourism has the potential to destroy the available common environmental resources through overuse and poor management practices, as limited information disclosure and poor monitoring of actions encourage the perpetuation and extension of environmental problems. Based on the adaptive resource management paradigm for addressing problems related to the use of the commons, this paper suggests a methodology for the development of a management tool that can provide island hotels with a continuous fl ow of timely, relevant, accurate and objective information on the environmental impact of critical corporate activities. The tool, named the destination environmental scorecard (DES), draws on activity-based management concepts and can help local hotel SMEs measure and compare their performance against certain standards and thus conduct operations in a responsible and measurable way to the benefi t of both business fi nancial performance and regional sustainability. The paper presents the DES operational characteristics and the potential benefi ts from its implementation.

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