WORLD PARKS CONGRESS 2003
SA set for eco-tourism boom
15 September 2003
Southern Africa has been identified as one of three world regions likely to show significant tourism growth in the foreseeable future. The other two regions are South America and Asia.
Addressing a media conference at the World Parks Congress in Durban on Friday, the senior director for ecotourism at Conservation International, Costas Christ, said these statistics were hardly surprising in view of the fact that nature tourism had developed into the fastest-growing industry in the world travel business.
Christ was introducing a new publication, "Tourism and Biodiversity: Mapping Tourism's Global Footprints", of which he is a co-author.
The book is regarded as the most comprehensive report ever published on the subject, and highlights threats and opportunities for protected areas created by this booming industry. Based on two years of research, the book aims to "help chart a positive way forward for tourism development".
"Tourism generates 11% of global gross domestic product (GDP), employs 200 million people, and transports 700 million international travellers per year - figures which are expected to double by 2020", Christ said.
"Tourism has huge potential for good or evil. It is in everyone's interest that the economic power of 21st century tourism is harnessed for the benefit of local people and wildlife", said Klaus Toepfer, executive director of the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP).
Conservation International President Russ Mittemeier was very specific about the implications of large influxes of tourists into protected areas. "Integrating biodiversity conservation into tourism planning can result in better business for the industry, whereas destruction of the environment would be synonymous with killing the goose that lays the golden egg", he said.
Source: BuaNews
| 
