Compare methods

	Limits of Acceptable Change	Tourism Carrying Capacity Assessment
Field	Tourism Recreation	Tourism Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1985	1986
Originator	George H. Stankey, David N. Cole, Robert C. Lucas, Margaret E. Petersen & Sidney S. Frissell	A. M. O'Reilly (tourism formulation)
Type	Condition-based recreation and wilderness planning pipeline	Threshold-based assessment of sustainable visitor levels
Seminal source	Stankey, G. H., Cole, D. N., Lucas, R. C., Petersen, M. E., & Frissell, S. S. (1985). The Limits of Acceptable Change (LAC) System for Wilderness Planning. Gen. Tech. Rep. INT-GTR-176. Ogden, UT: USDA Forest Service, Intermountain Forest and Range Experiment Station.	O'Reilly, A. M. (1986). Tourism carrying capacity: concept and issues. Tourism Management, 7(4), 254-258.
Aliases	LAC Planning Framework, Acceptable Change Planning, LAC Wilderness Planning System	Tourism Carrying Capacity, TCC Assessment, Destination Carrying Capacity, Tourism Capacity Analysis
Related	3	3
Summary	The Limits of Acceptable Change (LAC) framework is a planning system for managing recreation and wilderness areas that shifts the central question from 'how much use is too much?' to 'how much change in conditions is acceptable, and where?' Developed by George Stankey and colleagues for the USDA Forest Service in 1985, LAC accepts that any human use produces some change and that managers must therefore define, in advance, the conditions they are willing to tolerate. The framework proceeds through a structured sequence: partition the area into opportunity classes, choose measurable indicators of resource and social conditions, set explicit standards for each indicator by class, monitor those indicators over time, and trigger management actions whenever a standard is exceeded. By anchoring decisions to desired conditions rather than to a single carrying-capacity number, LAC turns visitor management into a transparent, defensible, and monitorable process.	Tourism carrying capacity assessment estimates the maximum level of visitor use a destination or site can sustain before its environment, infrastructure, host community, or visitor experience begins to deteriorate unacceptably. The concept, given its influential tourism formulation by A. M. O'Reilly in 1986, recognises that carrying capacity is not a single number but a set of limits operating across distinct dimensions — physical and ecological capacity on the resource side, social capacity on the host and visitor side, and economic capacity on the activity side — with the binding constraint being whichever is reached first. Carrying capacity is the conceptual engine behind Butler's Tourism Area Life Cycle, explaining why unmanaged growth leads to stagnation, and it underpins much of sustainable destination management even as it has been refined into more flexible, indicator-based frameworks.