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201221Oct11:09

Endan­gered ani­mals caught in the tourist trap, says Aus­tralian eco­tourism expert

Infor­ma­tion
pub­lished 21 Octo­ber 2012 | mod­i­fied 21 Octo­ber 2012
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Ecotourism cheetahwithpreyLinks between tourism and con­ser­va­tion, both pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive, are increas­ingly wide­spread and sig­nif­i­cant world­wide.

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)


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Tiger map” (CC BY 2.5) by Sander­son et al., 2006.

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