6. Ecotourism

Tourism is a powerful and sometimes dangerous force in the modern world. Tourism can save cultures and the local way of life but it can also destroy them. Tourism can help to protect environments, plants and animals, but it can also damage them. So problems of ecology are very important nowadays.

Ecotourism is environmentally friendly and it also benefits local communities. Ecotourism is called responsible and sensitive tourism. Some tourist companies advertise jungle treks, scuba diving and other expeditions as ‘nature tourism’. But the popularity of these activities has caused environmental problems. Like mass tourism, mass jungle trekking can damage the ecosystem and the living and working conditions of local people.

Tourists only think of what they pay for food, travelling and accommodation. Nature for them is free. It is not so. The natural environment will be destroyed if tour operators and tourists don’t change the way of thinking.

Tour companies must provide travellers with a pack of instructions on how to behave and what to do to best preserve the cultures and places visited. The key factor in minimizing damage through tourism is to keep groups to a manageable size and then you can control how they behave. People now go on holiday to restore ancient monuments or clean up beaches. There are programmes to protect wildlife habitats in Kenya and Tanzania, to save the rhino, veterinary programmes and so on.

It is important to educate visitors so that they are sensitive to both the physical and the cultural environments of the area they are visiting.

Sustainable tourism

Growing concern over the negative impacts of tourism during the 1990s led eventually to the concept of sustainable tourism or sustainable tourism development. Such development should:

• use environmental resources in a way that maintains their essential ecological processes and helps to conserve a region’s natural heritage and biodiversity;

• respects the sociocultural authenticity of host communities and conserve their built and living cultural heritage;

• contribute to intercultural understanding and tolerance;

• ensure viable, long-term economic activities which will, in turn, provide economic benefits to everybody, especially to local people;

• create stable employment and generate income-earning opportunities and social services for the host communities.

From this, we can see that sustainable tourism development is not just a response to the negative environmental impacts of tourism, but to sociocultural and economic impacts, too.

Sustainable tourism is not the same as ecotourism or green tourism. Ecotourism aims to provide tourists with the chance to understand a natural or cultural environment without permanently altering it. Green tourism is essentially the same in its aims as ecotourism, but the term green is used to create a contrast with white tourism (skiing and winter sports) or blue tourism (sea, sand, and sun). Sustainable tourism is far more wide-reaching concept than either green tourism or ecotourism, and is one that seeks sustainability in all aspects of tourism, from the management of city centre hotels or the recycling of aircraft cabin waste from tourist destinations in the Antarctic.

A wide range of national and international, private and public sector bodies such as the World Tourism Organization (WTO) or the World Travel and Trade Council (WTTC) have issued guidelines as to what constitutes sustainable tourism. Thus, it is felt to be possible for providers of mass tourism such as tour operators to be eco-friendly. A key concept in determining sustainability is carrying capacity. This term refers to the maximum number of visitors a tourist destination or attraction can support without any lasting negative effects on the host community.