**This is an old revision of the document!**
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:
Here are the main impacts that low-impact tourism aims to reduce:
Social & cultural impacts
The vast majority of tourism is a long way from responsible. It’s a huge, highly lucrative and completely unregulated global industry dominated by some big players that are very difficult to hold to account and who don’t lack for willing customers. The pressure and stresses of modern life, combined with the often bad British weather and the increased accessibility of air travel, have placed the foreign holiday within everyone’s reach and elevated it from a luxury to something approaching a right. Unfortunately, a kind of ethical blind spot often exists when it comes to travel: people who try to live sustainably throughout the year will think nothing of jetting halfway round the world for a couple of weeks of sunshine.