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Low-impact tourism
“Despite evidence of growing public awareness of the impacts of air transport, there remains an alarming disconnection between attitudes and tourist behaviour.” — Scott Cohen et al.
What is low-impact tourism?
Low-impact tourism is about sustainable travel and leisure activities that directly benefit local communities and that are respectful of wildlife, local people and their cultures - including travel that minimises our negative impact on the environment and the places we visit.
OK, let’s get one thing out of the way first. You’ll see lots of advertising around ‘eco’ or ‘sustainable’ tourism. So, sustainable tourism has two components:
- How you get there
- What you do once you’re there
Almost all information on eco-tourism focuses on the second point and ignores the first. A lot of ‘eco’ holidays or tourism is on a different continent from where they’re advertised, with absolutely no mention of the need to fly to get there. A holiday that involves a flight can in no way be described as ‘eco’. So, to be clear, flying to Costa Rica to visit the cloud forest or to Africa to go on safari are definitely not examples of low-impact tourism. If that’s what you need to do, then do it, but don’t call it sustainable, because it isn’t. This video nails it:
Does aviation has a place in a low carbon world? [From Wikipedia: “The International Air Transport Association (IATA) considers an annual increase in aviation fuel efficiency of 2 percent per year through 2050 to be realistic. However, both Airbus and Boeing expect the passenger-kilometers of air transport to increase by about 5 percent yearly. Sustainable transportation is now established as the critical issue confronting a global tourism industry that is palpably unsustainable, and aviation lies at the heart of this issue.”]
Here are the main impacts that low-impact tourism aims to reduce: