Environmental Planning and Policy for Green Tourism

Abstract

With good environmental planning and management, natural-areas tourism can make a major contribution to conservation; but if poorly managed, the tourist industry will damage precisely those areas with the greatest conservation value. In particular, the only forms of tourist development which should be permitted inside conservation areas are those whose primary purpose is based on wilderness recreation or enjoyment of conservation values. Facilities for other forms of recreation should be constructed outside conservation areas. Sound policy and planning tools are required to achieve these aims. Whilst the tourist industry as a whole has an incentive to protect its environmental resource base, this does not necessarily apply to individual tourist developers and operators in the short term. There is an immediate analogy to the pastoral industry, where environmental degradation is now widespread.

Information needs include: environmental baseline data; environmental sensitivities to tourist-related impacts; indicators of environmental change as a result of tourist impacts; and audit of actual impacts. All these need to be related to the type, timing, intensity and location of tourist activities. Economic information is also required: both on the economics of the tourist industry, and on conservation values and option costs of environmental damage.

Standard environmental impact assessment, though a valuable tool, is not particularly well suited to environmental planning for the tourist industry. Tourist developments tend to occur in particular types of environment, and to be small in individual impact but large in number. Cumulative impacts are therefore of particular concern. Social impacts are also particularly important for many tourist developments. EIA therefore needs to be coupled with other environmental planning tools, notably environmental benefit-cost analysis, environmental sensitivity mapping, and regional environmental planning.

Environmental policy instruments and management tools for the tourist industry must cover three main aspects: zoning, intensity, and multiple use strategies. They fall into five main categories: regulation and surveillance; incentives and disincentives; physical protection and hardening; education; and information collection and dissemination. Environmental planning and policy for tourist industries needs to take a broad perspective covering international as well as domestic tourists, destinations, costs and competition. Attempts to produce national environmental guidelines for tourist development are commendable, but need to be integrated into more comprehensive national tourist strategies. Such strategies also need to consider controls on foreign investment in land and tourist development, to counter the increasing vertical integration in foreign-owned tourist operations. They need to include mechanisms for generating a financial return from public environmental capital used by private sector tourist operators. However, such mechanisms must be careful to avoid placing managers of conservation areas in a conflict of interests between short-term economic imperatives, and the primary goal of environmental protection for these areas. Strategies should specifically consider social equity aspects; and finally, they might consider the use of tax instruments to control tourist development by overseas interests.

In conclusion, there is an urgent global need to conserve the world’s remaining natural areas; not least, because they contain resource capital in the form of irreplaceable genetic diversity, Economic returns on this genetic capital, however, would be long-term, so a mechanism to generate short-term cash flow from these natural areas is needed urgently. Tourism provides the only option currently available; and it can also increase public awareness of environmental issues. It is, however, crucial that it be well managed, or its environmental costs could greatly outweigh its environmental benefits. Careful use of environmental planning and policy tools is therefore particularly crucial in the tourist industry.