英语论文网

Community-Based Ecotourism: How to Make It Work

Abstract: Coincident with concerns about the accelerating loss of species and habitats has been a growing appreciation of the importance of biological diversity, the number of species in a particular ecosystem, to the health of the earth and human well-being. From a systemic point of view, this paper applies the concept of economics and marketing to generate an understanding of the processes of tourism change leading to, and resulting from the development of a community-based ecotourism venture in the world. The study indicate that while a high competitive market may have been instrumental in the formation of this ecotourism, it could be in danger of being eroded, because of the way in which the business is being managed to the max profit in a short term run.

Keywords: monitoring, ecotourism, market segmentation, price bias

Introduction

Ecotourism is the fastest growing sector, with an estimated growth rate of 10 to 15% [1], of one of the largest industries in the world: tourism. In China, survey showed that in some nature reserves the average increase of visitors from 1995 to 1998 was 87.8%, while during the same period the increase in tourists nationwide was 37.0% for foreign tourists and 10.3% for domestic tourists. Obviously nature reserve tourism is developing more rapidly than other types of tourism [2]. More and more scholars study the cases and feasibility of ecotourism. After United Nations proclamation of 2002 as the International Year of Ecotourism, the passion was given another push. Along with the value of the traditional public tour changed, the market changed, but the operation of the management may not change accordingly. From an economic perspective, investigations of the economic impacts of tourism and recreation commonly involve the calculation of economic outputs which enable researchers to estimate the utility effects of any given role in final demand. Economy’s level of output can be defined as the income, employment, government revenue and, where applicable, foreign exchange flows. Almost everyone agreed the ecotourism should not just be a marketing slogan. From a development perspective, ecotourism ventures should only be considered successful if local communities have some measure of control over them and if they share equitably in the benefits emerging from ecotourism activities from a long term point of view. That is a balancing problem between economy and ecology. Monitoring is a critical component of any management process designed to cope with the uncertainty that is always present in predictions of impacts. Long-term monitoring will require community involvement.

1. Basic concept of ecotourism
Australia's National Ecotourism Strategy defines ecotourism as "nature-based tourism that involves Education and interpretation of the natural environment and is managed to be ecologically sustainable". This concept came out of four stages about tourism: advocacy platform, cautionary platform, adaptancy platform and alternative tourism. (Weaver and Oppermann, 2000 cited by [3]) Many definitions had been put forward which shifted from bio-centric to anthropocentric or from deep ecologists to technological utopians. To make things clear, ecotourism should have four criterions as: 1. Belongs to tourism, it is a kind of business; 2. Based on nature, especially on charismatic mega-fauna(Henry, 1980; Leader-Williams, Dalal-本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。