This systematic literature review is designed to evaluate the current state of knowledge in rural homestays and tourism academic literature. With reference to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) flowchart, we reviewed 94 studies published in the selected journals from January 1, 2010, to December 31, 2020. Our review explores how sustainable rural homestays have been previously researched in terms of the context, topic, sample, method, geographical location, and theoretical framework. The review provides insights on sustainability and rural homestay tourism from the perspective of co-occurrence beside highlighting the valuable content addressed by authors and suggesting future research directions. In a sustainable rural tourism context, only 51% of the reviewed studies had considered homestay as the core and independent area of inquiry. This review notes an increasing number of researchers from developing countries are working on community-based rural homestays, especially in the Asia-Pacific region. Unfortunately, important topics—like homestay branding, homestay and entrepreneurship, homestays and information and communication technology (ICT) competency, homestay operator’s training and development about sustainability—are rarely addressed in the existing literature.

Fresh water will be the main problems of development in the 21st century. So the present discussion on water use, conservation and sustainability begins supposing that protection of the water environment is a ethical imperative, but.hardly ever questions the basis of this standpoint. Howevec the present article is an endeavor to classzfi some of the basis that might inspire such a position, seeking to locate value in the natural world beyond anthropocentric utilitarianism. Only when there is a clear basis for this discussion it is possible to discuss and resolve issues and conflicts that arise in the management of water that means between present and future users, between human and non-human users, or between competing human users. We then attempt to develop a 'code of water use ethics: parallel to the famous 'land ethics' in which we see water as the centre of the web of life in the landscape. Protecting water; its quality and its availability, for all present and future users, is one touchstone for the evaluation of environmental action andpolicy.