Ecotourism as a part of sustainable tourism

Tourism is like a fire: you can use it to cook your soup, but it can also burn down your house.

Asian proverb

There are no strict definitions of green tourism, sustainable tourism, and ecotourism, which is a problem, as organizations, companies, and individuals tend to use the same terms to mean different things, but the WTO sees the concept of sustainable tourism as something that covers all forms of tourism, including mass tourism. In addition, sustainable tourism can be developed in natural areas and urban areas. Ecotourism is concerned with natural areas, with a focus on ecology, as the name suggests. It’s a kind of sustainable tourism that focuses on ecology.

Sustainable means that the activity can go on for a long period of time. Sustainability means carrying capacity. It’s about tourism carrying as the maximum number of people that can visit a tourist destination at the same time, without damaging the physical, economic, sociocultural environment, and without producing an unacceptable decrease in the quality of visitor satisfaction.

There are three major areas of tourism impact – environmental, sociocultural, and economic. And in each sphere sustainable tourism has a mechanism for calculating the carrying capacity of a destination. Sustainable tourism works in all sectors and at all levels. Large companies, small and medium enterprises, host communities, and of course, the individual tourist.

Sustainable tourism

Growing concern over the negative impacts of tourism during the 1990s led eventually to the concept of sustainable tourism or sustainable tourism development. Such development should:

• use environmental resources in a way that maintains their essential ecological processes and helps to conserve a region’s natural heritage and biodiversity;

• respects the sociocultural authenticity of host communities and conserve their built and living cultural heritage;

• contribute to intercultural understanding and tolerance;

• ensure viable, long-term economic activities which will, in turn, provide economic benefits to everybody, especially to local people;

• create stable employment and generate income-earning opportunities and social services for the host communities.

From this, we can see that sustainable tourism development is not just a response to the negative environmental impacts of tourism, but to sociocultural and economic impacts, too.

Sustainable tourism is not the same as ecotourism or green tourism. Ecotourism aims to provide tourists with the chance to understand a natural or cultural environment without permanently altering it. Green tourism is essentially the same in its aims as ecotourism, but the term green is used to create a contrast with white tourism (skiing and winter sports) or blue tourism (sea, sand, and sun). Sustainable tourism is far more wide-reaching concept than either green tourism or ecotourism, and is one that seeks sustainability in all aspects of tourism, from the management of city centre hotels or the recycling of aircraft cabin waste from tourist destinations in the Antarctic.

A wide range of national and international, private and public sector bodies such as the World Tourism Organization (WTO) or the World Travel and Trade Council (WTTC) have issued guidelines as to what constitutes sustainable tourism. Thus, it is felt to be possible for providers of mass tourism such as tour operators to be eco-friendly. A key concept in determining sustainability is carrying capacity. This term refers to the maximum number of visitors a tourist destination or attraction can support without any lasting negative effects on the host community.