University of Aarhus ECOTOURISM AS A WAY TO PROTECT ...

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Ecotourism as a sustainable way to protect nature empowerment. Communities will perhaps try to preserve their traditional culture because of outside visitor’s interest. Traditional culture demonstration is one of several income sources, tied to the local community in ecotourism (Sven, 2000). It is one of several reasons that tourists plan to travelling to protected areas (Joseph, 1997). The sustainability of ecotourism is very dependent on tourism management strategies. The “carrying capacity” concept may be very useful and should be implemented in the tourism management strategy. It is really needed to define the limit levels that the whole ecosystems can tolerate. In order to do that, we need to focus our attention on the whole ecotourism system, including local capacity building, susceptibility of the natural ecosystem, sensitivity of the local culture, etc. But it is very difficult to define different kinds of tourism. Therefore, the “carrying capacity” needs to be very flexible and adaptable to different tourism situations. Weaver (2001) has also agreed with our ideas and emphasised that the carrying capacity could not be fixed. Carrying capacity alone may not be enough to ensure success in the control of ecotourism impacts. The flexible and dependable actions sometimes succeed ant other times they do not. It depends very much on the whole capacity building and also on the individual participant. Every participant has their own skill to carry out ecotourism activities. Some can do well and some cannot. The emergent local guides at The Galapagos Islands could not control well the visitors because of lacking education (Honey, 1999). This evidence indicates that how importance of capacity building is. If capacity building is ignored, long-term negative impacts will be accumulated and lead to expose to the ecotourism environment later. This is called “accumulated impacts” from ecotourism. 76
Ecotourism as a sustainable way to protect nature In order to minimise the accumulated impacts, monitoring programs may play an important role. Such programs should be planned as part of the ecotourism operation strategy. The right monitoring program could figure out good indicators and frequency checking. It will help the ecotourism manager to reflect on experiences from past ecotourism activities. It also means that any problems will be recognised as early as possible, before the serious problems occur. Therefore, the existing management plans can be improved and help create a better tourism situation. Indicators and frequency checking for ecotourism monitoring depend on each ecotourism operation (see more in appendix 2). It should be focused on activities in ecotourism, the site activities, the sensitivity of the ecosystem (threatened species, rare species, endangered species, etc). Appropriate indicators should indicate environmental changes when negative impacts occur. The frequency checking should implement to recognise every environmental change. The UNEP (1998) has pointed out some ways of monitoring an ecotourism operation. It includes site visit monitoring, visitor feedback monitoring, third-party monitoring, and self monitoring. Monitoring program is globally promoted in environmental impact assessment (EIA) procedure, particularly in the developing projects. Ecotourism should involve EIA in the future. It will help to predict what will happen And what should be done to solve negative impacts Also what should be maximised during ecotourism activities without causing harm to the whole ecosystem. Monitoring programs also help the ecotourism manager to adjust the ecotourism activity plans when they find negative tendencies in ecotourism development. For example, from the monitoring program, we may recognise the excessive visiting numbers. This recognition will alarm when it is needed to control the number of visitor or other things to improve the capacity building, 77
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University of Aarhus ECOTOURISM AS A WAY TO PROTECT ...

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