Planetary futures amidst the biodiversity crisis: Rethinking the role of nature tourism for conservation (1/2)

Abstract der Sitzung

Alongside climate change, biodiversity loss is a second major threat to the future of humanity on our planet. In line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, large areas of land have been designated worldwide for biodiversity conservation. Some voices, such as the Half-Earth Initiative, call for radical action to intensify efforts and restore ecosystems by reserving half of the Earth’s surface for wildlife. Others argue for a profound review of human-environment relations, linking the issue of biodiversity conservation to a more fundamental critique of the capitalist system. While for decades large-scale conservation efforts focused mainly on the Global South, the idea of “rewilding” the existing man-made environment has recently been gaining momentum in Europe. Perhaps most striking in this context is the return of stable wolf populations in many parts of Western Europe, leading to an intensification of human-wildlife conflicts in rural areas.

In practice, protected area management takes many forms, from more exclusionary national parks with restricted access for residents, to privately managed parks that treat wildlife as an economic asset, to community-based management seeking to establish inclusive forms of resource management or the Biosphere Reserves initiated by UNESCO. What all these approaches have in common is that they seek to protect functional ecosystems from extraction-oriented economic sectors. In many cases, tourism is seen as a solution to combine the urgent need for conservation with the economic use of these areas. Through multiple interactions of tourism stakeholders with local businesses, tourism can provide a solid economic base for local populations that would otherwise rely on the protected area as a resource for exploitation. This holds especially true for lagging regions in the Global South. Similarly, in industrialised countries of the Global North, the designation of a protected area is usually associated with major obstacles of acceptance.

However, the global spread of the COVID-19 virus in the early 2020s has challenged this approach. The pandemic caused significant disruption to established global production networks, and this disruption had profound impacts on regional and local economies. In particular, rural regions that rely highly on wildlife tourism within their protected areas highlighted the vulnerability of tourism to external shocks. On the other hand, the COVID-19 pandemic has also led to increased use of local recreation areas in more densely populated areas such as Germany, requiring new approaches to visitor management. The aim of this session is to bring together global perspectives on tourism and conservation to understand the challenges caused not only by COVID-19 and to explore future conservation pathways. Contributions that critically address the institutional, developmental and socio-ecological dimensions of tourism in protected areas in Europe and elsewhere in the world are encouraged.