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Theme: Tourism and Biodiversity

Project: Mapping Tourism’s Footprint

In 2002 IIED worked with Conservation International’s Ecotourism Department and Centre for Environmental Leadership in Business and with UNEP’s Sustainable Tourism Department to map, on a series of GIS maps, the overlap between tourism, biodiversity and poverty. The maps show that:

• While most biodiversity is concentrated in the South,  a number of major tourism destinations in the North (eg the Mediterranean, the California Coast, Florida Keys) coincide with biodiversity hotspots
  
  
• While receiving fewer tourists overall than the North, many poor, biodiverse countries receive large numbers of visitors.
  
  
• Moreover, a number of hotspot countries in the South are experiencing very rapid tourism growth (eg Peru, South Africa)
  
  
• Forecasts suggest that tourism is likely to become increasingly important in hotspot countries – particularly in South East Asia – and will require careful planning if it is not to impact negatively on biodiversity.

The maps are intended to provide an overview of global trends and to highlight to key decision makers that, properly managed and directed tourism could contribute to poverty reduction both directly by capitalising on the biodiversity assets of the poor through biodiversity-based pro-poor tourism and indirectly by reducing the vulnerability of the poor to environmental degradation. However, without careful planning tourism is likely to impact negatively on biodiversity and undermine local livelihoods. 

View the report (PDF file 3.74Mb)

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