China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation (CBCGDF) and Responsible Tourism Partnership (RTP)'s online campaign of "I Love Earth | Responsible Tourism" launched jointly on this year’s Earth Day are currently in full swing. For details and how to participate, please click https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/LBhCwttG3ImmfA-D3UKSzA.
Dr. Harold Goodwin, Managing Director of Responsible Tourism Partnership and International Centre for Responsible Tourism (ICRT), just shared us a video message he prepared for this activity. He talked about Earth Day, Responsible Tourism and biodiversity.
Revenues from tourism have made a major contribution to funding the conservation of habitat and species. Emeritus Professor Harold Goodwin's academic career began in the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology with a three-year research project on ecotourism. Dr. Goodwin reflected on what learnt about ecotourism from that research and analyze some of the outstanding examples of conservation where tourism has made conservation possible.
The CBCGDF Responsible Tourism Working Group, while sharing this video of Dr. Goodwin as follows, also organized the content of his speech into Chinese for readers to understand.
My name is Harold Goodwin. I'm the managing director of the Responsible Tourism Partnership in the UK and we organize the World Travel Markets response with Tourism Awards as well as running the program their trade shows. In the 1980s, I was actively involved in travelling to some of the world's most spectacular cultural and natural heritage sites with groups of relatively wealthy tourists and we began to see more and more signs that the ticket national parks talking about the eco-tourism slogan of taking any photographs and leave only footprints it seemed to me then that this was unreasonable for those national parks to exist.
The places we loved to travel to see local communities have had to be excluded from the parks so that they could be used to conserve wildlife and I approve of that. But the communities were losing any opportunity to use that space for their own economic development and it seemed to me that tourism need to put a lot more back into the conservation of the wildlife and of the habitats so important to the maintenance of wildlife populations and biodiversity.
On Earth Day it seems to me particularly important to reflect on how important tourism is to the conservation of wildlife in habitats and to recognize that it's going to be a particularly tough year for all of those national parks nature reserves and conservation areas around the world which rely on tourism for a major part of their funding.
Every year in the world responsible tourism wards we see some great examples of how tourism can contribute to the maintenance of wildlife and habitats. But the reality is that tourism doesn't put back anything like enough to maintain the wildlife estate is so vital to our survival as a species and to the future of tourism. When I undertook research for the British government from the University of Kent in the 1990s it was very clear that at least in some parts the visits by tourists were being subsidized by domestic taxpayers because the tourists were simply not paying enough to cover the cost of them being in the national parks. I don't mean for them for the purchase and maintenance of the park but just for the management of the tourists within the park.
So as we reflect on International Earth Day about the future of tourism conservation and the maintenance of a healthy population of wildlife it's important I think to reflect on what we can do through responsible tourism to ensure the maintenance of the habitat and the wildlife that lives in it.
Thank you for listening.
(Photo credit: Harold Goodwin official website)
(Photo credit: Harold Goodwin)
https://v.qq.com/x/page/e0955bp57qz.html
(Video credit: Harold Goodwin)
Original Chinese article:
http://www.cbcgdf.org/NewsShow/4937/12175.html
By / Maggie