At present, public consciousness on respecting and safeguarding the environment is declining rapidly. On that note, this study assumes that growing tourism has negative environmental implications. To satisfy tourism demand, overconsumption, and overexploitation through the development of tourism-related facilities have generated waste that destroy ecosystem functions. Ecological footprint is used to study the environmental impact of tourism activities by including the role of governance in our model. The outcome reveals that the environment is significantly affected by tourism pressure and good governance is essential for environmental protection.

This study aims to examine the role of natural attractions, measured by biodiversity in attracting international tourists. This study was conducted from 2010 to 2016 for 120 countries. Several static approaches such as Pooled Ordinary Least Square (POLS), Random Effect (RE) as well as Fixed Effect (FE) were used to estimate the static effect between biodiversity and international tourist arrivals. Overall, the robust standard error results show that the choice of a tourism destination is strongly related to biodiversity. Moreover, the outcome also reveals that GDP per capita, good governance, investment in the travel and tourism sector, as well as the internet are positively significant in determining the tourism demand. Surprisingly, both the exchange rate and life expectancy are insignificant in this study. Therefore, the role of the government is essential to ensure the policies are correctly implemented to enhance the development of the tourism sector.