Tourism creates ecological impacts, but it can generate financial and political support for conservation. The net outcome depends on interlinked issues such as land ownership, land-use history, tourist behaviour, the biology of plants and animals, the intricacies of government budgets and the contractual details of commercial concession agreements, nearby human settlements and liabilities of land managers.
How close and complex these links can be is not always appreciated, as revealed lately by controversy over tiger tourism in India. One way to show their significance is to calculate the proportion of total remaining populations, for rare and endangered plant and animal species, which are now protected by funding derived from tourism.
Two studies led by researchers from the International Centre for Ecotourism Research (Griffith University, Australia), recently published in the Journal PLOS ONE, show such calculations for mammal and frog species on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. The results highlight a new and critical issue. Parks agencies in many countries now rely so heavily on tourism revenue that their threatened species have effectively become dependent on the vagaries of international travel markets. This presents a new risk to many species, since international tourism flows can fluctuate widely and rapidly in response to airfares, security risks or disease outbreaks.
A number of threatened species have already suffered through exactly this mechanism. Examples include rhinoceroses in Nepal and lemurs in Madagascar.
The above news item is reprinted from materials available at Griffith University. Original text may be edited for content and length.
(Sources: Griffith News, 14.09.2012; NewScientist, 15.10.2012)