Abstract for: Tourism Carrying Capacity as a Dynamic Property of Complex Socio-ecological Systems

Overtourism is commonly framed as the exceedance of fixed carrying-capacity thresholds, yet such limits neglect feedbacks among tourists, residents, environmental quality, and economic capital. This can produce misleading policy targets. We address this gap by conceptualizing tourism systems as coupled nonlinear socio-ecological systems in which capacity is not exogenous, but emerges endogenously from system interactions and state-dependent constraints. We develop a minimal dynamical model with four state variables: residents, tourists, environmental quality, and economic capital. The system is governed by nonlinear feedback loops, including congestion, environmental pressures, and social responses to tourism intensity. Carrying capacity is derived analytically as a state-dependent constraint on tourist growth and is investigated through bifurcation analysis of key parameters. Beyond the specific model structure, we also prove the broad generality of the proposed definition. The model shows that tourism carrying capacity is not a fixed threshold, but rather a dynamic quantity that varies according to the state of the system. We identify regimes of stable coexistence, overtourism collapse, multistability, and oscillations. Small parameter changes can trigger critical transitions, revealing tipping points driven by feedback structure rather than external shocks alone. Carrying capacity is better interpreted as a diagnostic indicator rather than a control target. Policies that focus solely on limiting tourist flows risk acting on symptoms rather than addressing the underlying system structure. Effective governance requires modifying feedbacks, particularly those linking economic incentives, environmental degradation, and resident well-being, to steer the system toward desirable long-term regimes. Authors used ChatGPT in order to assist in revising the manuscript and debugging the codes employed for the simulations.