Benefits of Ecotourism Essay Example

An Assessment of USAID Support for Protected-Area Management, July 1995).

Contributions of ecotourism include raising local awareness about the value of biological resources, increasing local participation in the benefits of biodiversity conservation (through new sources of jobs and incomes), and generating revenues toward conservation of biologically rich areas. Wildlife and its habitats in developing countries are becoming increasingly popular attractions for international tourism. Many of the richest areas, biologically, are in the developing world.

Growing numbers of ecotourists are flocking to the mountains of Nepal and Madagascar, the tropical forests of Costa Rica and Thailand, and the beaches of Belize and Sri Lanka. Nature tourists bring with them money to spend, money that creates jobs and incomes for households and communities in and around national parks and other protected areas. Ecotourism enterprises tour agencies and guide services, lodges and private reserves as well as such satellite activities as crafts industries and transportation and food services, also generate revenues and foreign exchange.

Governments can use this income in operating and protecting natural habitats. By recognizing the importance of protecting biological diversity, ecotourism is raising appreciation for biological resources and leading to better conservation practices by developing country populations. It must of course be properly regulated and managed to protect against adverse environmental and cultural effects that can come with overbuilding of tourist facilities and influx of populations around fragile ecosystems. Assuming such oversight, nature tourism can benefit both the environment and economic development.

The Role of USAIDUSAID supports nature-based tourism activities as part of its biodiversity conservation programs in more than a dozen countries worldwide. The Agency's ecotourism activities include support for developing national park systems, demarcating and equipping new

national parks, recruiting and training park staff, and encouraging government reforms that promote regulated investments in private lodging, guide service, and other tourism ventures. The Agency's involvement is recent, beginning in the mid-1980s, and the effect of these activities is only starting to emerge.

USAID biodiversity conservation programs have demonstrated that potential local resistance to setting aside forest and fishing areas for conservation can often be softened by employment and income-producing opportunities ecotourism can generate. In Costa Rica, Jamaica, and Sri Lanka, USAID support led to the creation of entirely new wildlife parks that have begun to spawn tourism facilities around them. Tourist demand for food, lodging, souvenirs, educational materials, and guide and transportation services stimulates local investment, employment, and incomes.

Costa Rica has introduced revenue retention arrangements to eep earnings from entrance fees for park operations; it awards contracts to local communities to operate food and souvenir concessions as a means of building local involvement in and commitment to park conservation. Costa Rica has also included a variable park entrance fee structure (charging higher fees to international tourists than to local visitors) to increase revenues. In Nepal, Madagascar, and Thailand, USAID has supported integrated conservation and development activities to promote new livelihoods including nature tourism based employment as alternatives to encroaching into protected national parks for hunting, logging, and farming.

Engagement of local people in planning and conducting ecotourism activities has generated a new group of stakeholders with a vested interest in protecting parks. The new nature jobs depend on it. USAID's Central American Paseo Pantera ("Panther Walk") project has helped establish national nature tourism councils in Guatemala and Honduras to involve local communities and tourism enterprises.

The councils also enlist international conservation organizations as advisers to promote green, self-sustaining tourism activities.

In 1989 the Agency began a Parks in Peril project to improve management of 20 parks in Latin America and the Caribbean. The project also seeks to enhance recreational and educational use of the parks. For example, in Bolivia, Parks in Peril is working through a U. S. environmental nongovernment organization (NGO) to assist a Bolivian NGO in providing nature tourism packages in two national parks. The project has helped create jobs for tour guides, park rangers, educators, and the like in several countries in the region.