This paper aims at addressing sustainability concerns in vulnerable insular territories. Such concerns are due to the rising overtourism phenomenon that affects islands at a rapidly escalating pace and renders sustainable local development of these outstanding areas—from a natural and cultural viewpoint—at stake. Towards this end, this work capitalizes on current literature and attempts to structure a methodological framework and a respective set of indicators’ groups that are capable of assessing dimensions of overtourism in each single tourism destination, thus providing evidence-based and more robust guidelines for articulating policy decisions that can remedy incidents of overtourism. The proposed methodological framework follows a place-based approach and combines tourism demand and supply data with environmental, social, economic and spatial data and respective indicators for assessing the tourism density and intensity of each destination’s tourism pattern and related multi-dimensional impacts. Validation of both the proposed framework and indicators’ groups is conducted in Santorini Island, Greece, i.e., an island that lies at top positions of many lists of destinations, marked as suffering by overtourism. Results show that Santorini Island is confronted with severe overtourism impacts, which are highly affecting its identity, productive model and spatial pattern, while endangering its natural and cultural wealth.

Tourism, although a key driving force for the flourishing of local/regional and national economies, is also a source of distinct negative repercussions, e.g., the intense use of scarce resources, environmental deterioration, social marginalization, and the degradation of the quality of life of host communities, to name but a few. These repercussions appear to be further exacerbated under overtourism conditions in a number of highly rated tourist destinations around the globe. Identifying host communities’ perceptions of the tourism footprint/burden is essential in contemporary policy research, which seeks to realize local perspectives, values, and expectations regarding the acceptable type/level of tourism development of their land and to highlight potential policy directions for future action that ensure sustainability and resilience objectives. Grounded in an assessment of overtourism impacts in a highly rated insular destination (Santorini Island, Greece), this work aims to gather community perceptions as to the drawbacks of the current tourism trajectory through a questionnaire survey. Results demonstrate that, although respondents recognize the crucial role that tourism plays in the island’s economic profile, they also acknowledge that the rapidly escalating expansion of the sector is unsustainable in the long run, with severe repercussions for both the environment and the quality of the community’s everyday life.

Despite the institutional establishment of Regional Adaptation Action Plans (RAAPs), no systematic cross-regional assessment has examined their structure and implementation dynamics. The objective of this research is to categorize various adaptation strategies identified at the regional level within the 13 RAAPs of Greece and evaluate the current implementation status by introducing a three-pillar RAAP assessment approach including (i) typological classification of all RAAP measures (soft, development and hard), (ii) functional classification of sectoral measures applied to two indicative pilot regions (Crete and the Ionian Islands) and (iii) stakeholder insights on the implementation of regional adaptation. Each measure is assigned to its corresponding adaptation sector to enable cross-regional comparison. The implementation level is assessed through interviews with regional officials exploring criteria guiding measure selection, existing funding mechanisms and social consequences. These findings reveal the characteristics of early stage regional adaptation planning in Greece, where monitoring priorities, institutional capacity and sectoral exposure strongly shape adaptation strategies. Beyond descriptive mapping, the study introduces a structured multi-level analytical framework that offers a replicable tool for the comparative assessment of regional adaptation governance and advances research from policy-inventory approaches toward governance-oriented evaluation at the sub-national scale.

Tourism, although a key driving force for the flourishing of local/regional and national economies, is also a source of distinct negative repercussions, e.g. intense use of scarce resources and environmental deterioration, social marginalization, degradation of the quality of life of host communities, to name but a few. These repercussions seem to be further deteriorating under overtourism conditions, noticed in a number of highly-rated tourist destinations around the globe. Identification of host community’s perceptions as to the tourism footprint/burden is essential in contemporary policy research, seeking to: realize local perspectives, values and expectations as to the acceptable type/level of tourism development of their land; and highlight potential policy directions for future action that ensure sustainability and resilience objectives. Grounded in overtourism im-pacts’ assessment in a highly-rated insular destination, i.e., Santorini Island, Greece, this work aims at gathering community’s perceptions as to the drawbacks of the current tourism trajectory by use of a questionnaire survey. Results demonstrate that although respondents realize the crucial role of tourism in the island’s economic profile, they also recognize the rapidly escalating enlargement of the sector as a non-sustainable one in the long run, with severe repercussions in both environmental terms and quality of commu-nity’s everyday life.