As noted by many speakers at the Congress, tourism and recreation provides considerable benefits to protected areas and their communities. These benefits are economic and social, creating greater appreciation of cultural and natural heritage. High quality experiences for park visitors increase interest in the protection and conservation of protected area values.
When poorly managed, visitation can contribute to the deterioration of cultural biodiversity, and ecosystem resources, and impact negatively on local communities.
Tourism in and around protected areas should be a tool for conservation: building support and raising awareness of the many important ecological, cultural, sacred, spiritual, aesthetic, recreational and economic values of protected areas. In addition, tourism generates much-needed income for conservation work in the places that it operates. It should also contribute to the quality of life of local communities; support indigenous people's traditions, respect sacred sites; and recognize the legitimacy of indigenous knowledge and law. Moreover, tourism provides opportunities for local employment and education of visitors. These tourism issues are found in all the key messages of the Congress.
Strategic policy implementation with effective management of visitation is essential to ecological integrity. For tourism to be an effective conservation tool, increased understanding of its beneficial effects and its negative consequences is required. This means a considerable capacity-building effort for park staff and communities to ensure the desired outcomes. It also requires a much better level of understanding of park visitation patterns, numbers and trends; and a more sophisticated understanding of effective conservation awareness, education and interpretation strategies.
Park visitation and nature-based tourism are vital to gaining support for parks and their conservation work. When used to underpin conservation, tourism becomes an essential component of the processes needed to implement the Convention on Biodiversity and other agreements concerning biodiversity, cultural heritage and sustainable development.12 To achieve the desired outcomes for conservation, local people, the tourism industry, and visitors must collaborate and cooperate with natural resource management agencies, the scientific community, government bodies and international agencies concerned with biological and cultural heritage policy and tourism planning. For the effective development of public-private partnerships involving tourism, there is a corresponding need for guidance in many management issues, such as policies on licensing, concessions and permits.
The Congress brought together conservation practitioners, policy-makers, environmentalists, social development activists and industry representatives seeking to influence the debate on the future of sustainable development. Within the debate tension exists between the hard edge, single objective conservation mindset and those seeking much broader outcomes than biodiversity conservation. This has been acknowledged as an important aspect of the debate for some time.
'Conservation now has the challenge of developing strategic responses and substantive inputs to global debates ... One of the lUCN's most important roles is that of fair broker between those whose activities might threaten nature - whether for profit or for sustenance - and those whose main concern is the unprecedented global extinction crisis we now face... [The lUCN's role] is bridging the gap between the heart and mind of conservation.' (Steiner, 2002).
6 Tourism and Protected Areas: Benefits Beyond Boundaries
The themes of the presentations and discussions emphasized the significance of the Congress for tourism, and the relevance of tourism to the current conservation agenda.
Some of the tourism issues taken up by the Congress included:
If there is to be diversity of stakeholders and a de-emphasis on governments as the sole providers of resources with a divestment of power to other interests (including local communities, private parks and natural resource user groups), then there is a considerable role for the tourism industry. However, there is a proviso: that the industry is responsible and constrained by a committed use of informed guidelines such as those embodied in the Tourism Recommendation adopted by the Congress.13
Similarly, if biodiversity conservation is to be linked to development agendas in the spirit of sustainable development, as articulated at the UN Summits14 the tourism industry will inevitably be part of this. However, it is less clear how the negotiation of global agendas will produce specific conservation outcomes and how to ensure that tourism will assist, rather than exacerbate, these efforts. For example, how can tourism assist with the urgent need to build networks of protected areas rather than islands!
Africa leads the way in this aspect of sustainable tourism: networks, corridors and buffer zones are being established and tourism is a crucial contributor, unlike under the traditional developed nation systems where park administration is almost wholly government funded.15 Tourism can assist with pressing conservation problems - such as halting the rate of species extinction16 - and advancing the protection of a much larger number of dry-land ecosystems and marine ecosystems, both of which are greatly under- represented among the world's protected areas. Less than 0.5% of the sea is currently under protection (Chape, 2003). In Chapter 20, Andrew and Hilary Skeat look at the role of tourism in the largest marine protected area in the world, the World Heritage-listed Great Barrier Reef Marine Park in Australia.
At the forefront of the development relationship is the expectation that parks provide benefits to communities: health benefits, poverty alleviation, cultural and spiritual sustenance, education outcomes and so on, as well as the provision of ecosystem services such as clean water and air. The potential role that tourism can play is obvious, especially ecotourism and other forms of community or natural and cultural heritage- based tourism. But the ideal, low environmental impact, high-income earning, efficiently managed sustainable tourism scenario, with its attendant expectations, verges on the Utopian. The fundamental idea that nature will only survive if people will it is, a priori, explicitly acknowledged. However, to couple the equally daunting challenges of survival of the natural environment and poverty alleviation is enormously complicated.
Is this asking too much of the benefits side of parks and of vehicles, like tourism, that are expected to deliver all these benefits?
The role and responsibilities of indigenous communities, which often are or were nomadic, with regard to the conservation and maintenance of landscapes deserves special attention. Indigenous cultural and ecological connection to country is acknowledged. The Congress discussion responded to the widespread colonial and post-colonial practice of removing indigenous peoples from their lands during the establishment of some parks. Equally, delegates responded to the idea that conservation outcomes are better achieved, and with an otherwise unachievable integrity, when Tourism and Protected Areas: Benefits Beyond Boundaries 7
indigenous people and their land rights are central to the management regime. The Congress further acknowledged that the extension of protected and community conserved areas could arise through reconciliation between indigenous and non- indigenous people in postcolonial contexts, and the extension of indigenous land rights elsewhere. Worldwide, tourism draws on traditional cultures. However, tourism can either enhance or hinder the roles indigenous peoples carry out in heritage conservation.
Chapters 5 and 6 discuss this issue with examples of tourism supporting co- management strategies and community-based conservation areas.
The emphasis on the relationship between protected areas and people, and notions of benefits for communities, partnerships with the private sector and financial sustainability prompted extensive discussion about the primacy of biodiversity conservation, and whether this had been overshadowed. There was muted tension between those closest to the hotspots of species extinction and those articulating the need for more effective management of participation, local knowledge, livelihood, security and human well-being. Tourism, when conceptualized as a vehicle for conservation, obviously has a role in the promotion and understanding of the nature/culture/people triad. Sustainable tourism has a higher order responsibility when the attraction is in 'wilderness'17 or other ecologically sensitive areas. Chapters 16 and 17 highlight this issue, with examples of successful, high-yielding tourism ventures in Africa that significantly contribute to both conservation and poverty alleviation.
The urgent need for more sustainable financing of conservation work, with park management increasingly dependent on visitor fees and charges, and the need for better mechanisms to capture more economic benefit from tourism. Section 3 of this book devotes eight chapters to examining the issue of consistent funding, economic self- sufficiency and the financial benefits of tourism.
All parties agreed on the need for more reliable data and research that bridges epistemologies and is inclusive of traditional knowledge; and that through collaborative partnerships greater understanding of issues, priorities, practices and strategies is essential.
The UNEP/CI partnership and book/CD-ROM Tourism and Biodiversity: Mapping Tourism's Global Footprint serves as an excellent example of this essential work. The maps in this publication starkly reveal the overlap between tourism development and areas of greatest biodiversity threat. To prevent tourism cannibalizing itself by destroying the very resources upon which its viability depends, there needs to be greater efforts to strategically bring tourism development, biodiversity conservation and local communities together (Christ et al, 2003).
In Chapter 12, Martha Honey (Executive Director, TIES) points out that while tourists desire a safe and quality experience, sustainability is barely registering as a factor in their travels. Consequently progress on sustainability is contested, highlighting the need for certification. Again, partnerships between conservation bodies, government agencies and industry invariably yield the most productive outcomes.
The key issues discussed in tourism sessions and reflected in the Congress outputs and this book include:
Sources of financial support for protected areas;
Supporting sustainable use of natural and cultural diversity;
8 Tourism and Protected Areas: Benefits Beyond Boundaries
Linking practice to conventions and guidelines;
Fostering attachment to heritage through visitation and effective conservation education;
Encouraging a stewardship ethic amongst the public;
Working with local stakeholders and industry;
Supporting local and indigenous community development and poverty alleviation;
Co-management of protected areas; and
Contributing to civil society, engendering respect for others and for natural and cultural heritage.
These issues are discussed in Chapter 2 and form the focus of the following chapters by drawing on case studies presented at the Congress from different regions of the world, by a range of conservation-focused organizations and businesses. These chapters provide insights to the challenges and opportunities for benefits from tourism to protected areas and beyond.
In the last days of the Congress, the WPC Recommendations were formally presented.
Recommendation 12, Tourism as a Vehicle for Conservation and Support of Protected Areas (www.iucn.org/wpc2003) was adopted. This phrase from the opening paragraph sets the tone and the agenda:
'In this context, visitation, recreation and tourism are a critical component of fostering support for parks and the conservation of biological and cultural heritage. Careful and strategic implementation of policy together with pro-active and effective management of tourism is essential' (WPC, 2003).
The Recommendation is detailed in the concluding chapter, together with the social and political context within which the next ten years of stewardship will evolve. This chapter draws together the principal 'lessons learned' from examining tourism as a tool for biodiversity conservation (as described in the preceding chapters). In closing, the final chapter reviews discussion of the challenges and some of the promising directions in the often uneasy relationship between tourism and conservation.
The World Parks Congress dealt with broad and sweeping themes. The underlying and micro-themes received less attention than global perspectives. One of the most interesting omissions was a realistic discussion of the citizen, the person who spends their time and money visiting a park. There was scant attention paid to the goals, the loves, and the needs of the visitor. Why does a person visit? Why does s/he return or go elsewhere? What makes for a satisfied visitor? How does a satisfied visitor become a park supporter?
There was scant attention paid to the critical fact that the political environment that enables parks and protected areas to exist is inherently tied to the personal values individual citizens gain through attendance at a park. Without individuals gaining personal benefits, no tourism will occur. Park visitation is fundamental to an individual's understanding and appreciation of a park and its resources (Fig. 3). Without visitors, without satisfied visitors, parks and protected areas will cease to exist. Political support for parks only exists if sufficient numbers of satisfied park visitors are influential enough to affect societal decision-making. Park tourism is therefore fundamental to developing a pubic and political constituency for parks and protected areas. We wish to emphasize that successful park visitation is a critical function of parks and protected areas, for without it all other goals Tourism and Protected Areas: Benefits Beyond Boundaries 9
become unfeasible. Parks will only flourish with an appreciative and mobilized public constituency.