Community-Based Mountain Tourism: Practices for Linking Conservation with Enterprise
FINAL REPORT HERE
Focusing on 74 case studies from Africa, Asia, Australia and the Pacific, Europe, South America and North America, the report looks at practices which are proving successful in reducing the negative impacts of tourism and benefiting mountain communities and ecosystems.
The report identifies community leadership and a favorable national or regional policy environment as two central components of successful community-based mountain tourism initiatives. Principles of local control, partnerships, sustainable development and conservation are common elements of successful practice - principles which have the potential to be applied globally in mountain areas.
With tourism today the fastest growing industry in the world, this report finds that linking conservation, enterprise development and community control in mountain tourism will become a critical factor in ensuring the ongoing sustainability of mountain resources and populations.
"Inspirational to all, mountains are a global treasury containing almost one-third of the world’s designated protected areas. Almost half of humanity depends on mountain watersheds for their supplies of fresh water. Mountain people also represent thousands of years of accumulated experience living and working in their rugged and aweinspiring environments, and are intimately connected to the natural environment that sustains them. These traditional cultures are themselves fascinating and sources of great environmental wisdom. For all these reasons and more, mountains have become a magnet for tourism, which is the most rapidly growing industry in the world.
Massive increases of tourist activity in fragile mountain ecosystems pose a serious challenge in the developed world, and an even more daunting one in developing nations. How can mountain tourism be managed so as to avoid and minimize adverse environmental impacts? How can local communities receive an equitable share of the benefits from such tourism? Indeed, how can they interact with large numbers of tourists without destroying their own culture in the process? For 27 years, the Mountain Institute has been dedicated to addressing such issues through model programs that promote natural resource conservation, sustainable development, and cultural heritage. For such programs to be self -sustaining, they must empower local people to link conservation with their own self -interest. Properly managed ecotourism thus has the potential to generate revenue for communities through conservation-linked enterprise development.
The Mountain Institute therefore is particularly pleased to have been able to support the electronic conference on Community-Based Mountain Tourism: Practices for Linking Conservation and Enterprise, which furnished the case material for this report. No report, of course, can possibly do justice to the month of remarkable and rich discussions that took place, bringing together nearly 500 individuals and organizations from all parts of the globe. We are all deeply indebted to the conference participants for the care and candor they brought to the discussions, and for the enormous contribution their case studies represent. We are equally thankful to the outstanding guest moderators who contributed their time and ex pertise to lead the discussion, to the senior reviewers who helped close some of the major gaps in the report, and to the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation for its generous financial support of this initiative."
D. Jane Pratt
President and CEO, The Mountain Institute
