Tourism Carrying Capacity for Supporting Beach Management at Tanjung Bira, Indonesia

Based on the tourism carrying capacity assessment for the protection of the coastal area to explore Tanjung Bira beach as the study area and attempt to assess the optimum number of visitors that should be allowed without damaging the surrounding ecological, social and cultural environments by using the PAOT (people at one time) approach. The results of the study showed the Real Carrying Capacity (RCC) should be 202 beach user/day and the Effective Carrying Capacity (ECC) should be 117 beach user/day. Although there was a significant difference between physical-ecological and social-cultural carrying capacity, this study suggests that the physical-ecological carrying capacity may be applied for ecosystem management, whilst the Social-cultural carrying capacity may be addressed when management objectives are tourists and beach user.