Part 1 – Ecotourism 20 Years Ago

Part 2 – Ecotourism Now

The wave of initiatives to incorporate local communities into the management of tourism operations hit a high point in the late 1990s, but subsequent reports of failing enterprises began to flow in, swamping any sense of progress. More and more community‐based tourism projects, designed to operate autonomously with initial donor investments, were virtually without guests and no longer operational by 2008‐2009. If one reads the excellent text, Responsible Tourism, edited by Dr. Anna Spenceley, there are numerous chapters dedicated to poor investment in community‐based ecotourism in southern Africa. These examples largely stem from misplaced international donor investments, where ecotourism is still seen only as a community development exercise which can help preserve biological diversity without the necessary analysis of business prospects, markets and access to markets.

When I wrote Meeting the Global Challenge of Community Participation in Ecotourism in 1998, I
maintained that the problem with community based ecotourism was largely caused by the policies of international donors.

“Introducing a commercial venture into any local community, particularly indigenous communities, can raise false expectations and cause stress on local families if the communities must be responsible for the marketing of that venture once it is established. (sic)

Funding assistance given to community tourism ventures must not be undertaken without taking into account the full business planning cycle for any business venture including an analysis of the investment needs of the venture, market potential, competition, transportation time, food and beverage availability, logistical concerns for making the venture viable, potential for partnerships, joint promotions, joint ventures, and other vital links to the commercial sector of the tourism industry.”

Community-based ecotourism center in Chiapas, Mexico

In 2005, I was sent on a mission to review failing community‐based tourism enterprises in Chiapas, Mexico, for my international consultancy, EplerWood International. There had been an extraordinary amount of Mexican government investment in community‐based lodging, with the hopes of assisting indigenous people in the buffer zone of the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve. One group of community members I visited were sitting at the entrance to their beautiful lodge, waiting for visitors to arrive. They had none, and they kept the facility locked for special occasions. The solutions to their problems were not hard to confirm.

This and other lodges in the Montes Azules buffer zone were just two hours from Palenque, the famous Mayan ruins, and San Cristobal de las Casas, the mecca of alternative tourism in the state. Yet none of the local tour operators, based in these busy tourism destinations had been involved or even contacted about the establishment of the community enterprises nearby. When I reached out to the tour operators, they were more than interested in investigating the community operations to expand their itinerary options in this highly interesting and desirable rain forest region. Soon meetings between local tour operators, the government, and the local community representatives led to new alliances and more business for all involved.

This type of alliance building is both relatively straightforward and key to the success of community operations. But the work of developing strong partnerships between local communities and the private sector requires patience, skill and a strong understanding of local community values.

Ya’ax Can camping area, Chiapas, Mexico

One of the designers of the Kapawi Lodge in Ecuador, Arnaldo Rodriguez, wrote in the book Ecotourism and Conservation in the Americas, that the difference in principles between the community and private enterprise can be so conflicting, that at times, the community prefers to destroy the enterprise, even if it belongs in part to them. He notes that communities in the Amazonian region are very hesitant to create enterprises where benefits are not distributed immediately and equally, making it very difficult for them to partner with private enterprise. He concludes that community‐based ecotourism in the Amazon was subject to an overdose of enthusiasm and that the time and cost involved in partnering with communities is substantial.

However, Rodriguez concludes that in fact quite a few Amazonian communities had found ecotourism to be highly beneficial. He cites the benefits of the Kapawi Lodge to the Achuar people, the Napo Wildlife Center to the Quichua, and the Huao Lodge to the Huaorani. He reports that earnings of over $1 million in direct and indirect contributions for the Achuar were distributed to local communities from Kapawi’s profits between 1996‐2005. These funds served as an important incentive to block the entry of oil companies into Achuar territory.

In my work for EplerWood International from 2003‐2010, I have invested fully in recommending
solutions where the full business development cycle is respected for launching community‐based
tourism businesses, including feasibility studies, business planning and enterprise development
approaches, and substantial effort on the development of international market linkages. In El Salvador, my firm has worked for nearly four years to create Ecoexperiencias El Salvador a branded portal and green tourism development program for small, community‐based ecotourism enterprises all operating autonomously under one brand which is managed by a local tour operator. The effort has resulted in a supply chain where international bodies such as ResponsibleTravel.com have access to an array of community‐based products which will be highly marketable worldwide.

Discussions continue forward on making community based tourism function. The reality is simple. The investment to work with communities to engage them in business approaches takes time and money and highly expert individuals who are talented in both business and community relations. The cost to accomplish these types of ventures is higher than it would be for standard business approaches.

Young women in guide training, El Salvador

TIES consistently worked to draw attention to practical approaches, and in my era more often than not found that partnerships between local communities and private enterprises held the most promise. When local entrepreneurs, from Lima to Bangkok, committed to working closely with communities to either give them partnerships in enterprises or ownership of enterprises with strong connections to the supply chain, successes were more often found.

Differences in approaches throughout Africa, Latin America, and Asia have been important to learn, as each region of the world values land, enterprise and ownership in different ways. Nonetheless, in all cases community enterprise must enter the commercial world. This requires partnering with representatives of the supply chain via agreements that give access to the global marketplace, while ensuring local well‐being, culture and conservation are all cared for. The right formulas continue to deserve investment and international support.

More about the Author

Megan Epler Wood founded The International Ecotourism Society (TIES) in 1990, the oldest and largest non-profit organization in the world dedicated to making ecotourism a tool for sustainable tourism development worldwide. She was its President & CEO from 1991-2002. Since 2003, Megan’s firm EplerWood International has devoted itself to aiding some of the poorest countries in the world with sustainable tourism development, including the nations of Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Sierra Leone, Mexico, El Salvador, Brazil, and Honduras.

Her published works includes; Ecotourism: Principles, Practices and Policies for Sustainability for UNEP in 2002. She has lectured at Columbia Business School, Harvard University, Wellesley, Duke University, University of Vermont, and The George Washington University. She was named a Senior Fellow at the Institute at the Golden Gate in 2010 where she is developing next generation thinking on the development of tourism as a sustainable economic development tool in collaboration with leading universities, NGOs, and business professionals.

Kapawi Lodge, Ecuador: A full partnership project with the Indigenous Organization of Ecuadorean Achuar nationalities (OINAEI).

Part 1 – Ecotourism 20 Years Ago

In the early 1990s, hundreds of small scale ecotourism companies were working in remote areas of the planet engaging communities and seeking practical and legitimate solutions to delivering community benefits. Many mistakes were made. But action was heavy. By 1996, private firms like the Conservation Corporation, based in South Africa, were scaling up with a $60 million operation and a goal of creating 60‐100 luxury lodges in East and Southern Africa, all to employ ecotourism principles. In Ecuador, the Kapawi Lodge was founded with a $2 million investment, formulated from inception to be a full partnership project with the Indigenous Organization of Ecuadorean Achuar nationalities (OINAEI).

Dozens of small scale ecotourism projects were financed by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), with tens of millions of dollars invested to develop ecotourism enterprises in rural areas worldwide as a tool to help local communities and conserve biodiversity. Local governments across the planet followed suit, as did donors from Europe. A boom in investment in community‐based ecotourism was underway with 161 donor projects taking place in Latin America, Africa and Asia, as documented by The George Washington University in 2002.

The idea that responsible tourism can conserve the environment and benefit local people has always been part of the definition of ecotourism. But ecotourism pioneers were undoubtedly unclear how to perform this task properly in the early 1990s. The need for guidelines and forums soon had The Ecotourism Society fully engaged. While many skeptics pointed out that ecotourism was just another means to exploit local populations, this discounted the genuine possibility that ecotourism could help to reinvent tourism development practices for the better. Communities from the Serengeti to the Amazon, on the frontier of any type of global development, were more than interested in becoming a vital part of the tourism planning, development and implementation process.

By the mid‐90s, the small office of TIES was brimming over with information on tourism and community benefits from around the world. Our tiny staff, which at that time was 3 dedicated souls with one or two interns, based on the second floor of a house in Bennington, Vermont, collated the most well presented examples, and published information as quickly as it could be properly vetted, reviewed by peers, printed, and shipped. Between 1998‐1999, TIES published Volume 2 of the best selling text, Ecotourism, A Guide for Planners and Managers with three chapters on community benefits from ecotourism, Meeting the Global Challenge of Community Participation in Ecotourism, Case Studies and Lessons Learned from Ecuador with The Nature Conservancy, and an edition of Cultural Survival Quarterly on Protecting Indigenous Culture and Land through Ecotourism. These materials provide very good examples of how closely the question of ecotourism and community benefits was being investigated in this activist period.

Much more was transpiring on the ground. In Ecuador, the TIES sister organization, the Ecuadorean Ecotourism Association (EEA), launched a national review of community benefits and ecotourism. Workshops were held in both the Amazonian and coastal regions of Ecuador for local community input and participation, and a national forum was held with the goal of preparing guidelines. At this time, there was controversy regarding how community‐based tourism could obtain the legal status needed to operate, as some operations in the rain forest regions of Ecuador had even been shut down by the government. Guidelines created at this forum spelled out the requirement for special licensing for native guides at the national level and separate legal designations for communities to manage their own tourism businesses.

Epler Wood weaving with Huaorani women of Ecuador.

My own visits to Ecuador in the mid‐1990s were frequent, as I was investigating how community ecotourism was both flourishing and failing in this landmark country via a small grant given to TIES by The Nature Conservancy. While many local communities were rising to the challenge and finding whole new means to support themselves via ecotourism enterprises, others were failing badly. TIES worked closely with EEA and sought to support their efforts for better legislation to protect community ecotourism enterprises.

Just as the conference in Ecuador was concluding, TIES founding chairman, Dr. David Western, known to all his peers as Jonah, got in touch. He had been named Director of the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS), and wanted to bring international expertise on ecotourism to Kenya to improve community ecotourism development methodologies. Jonah had a long‐term vision to foster small tourism enterprises outside Kenya’s parks that directly benefited local communities and thereby encouraged more direct local engagement in the sustainable development of the wildlife‐rich ecosystems of Kenya.

We decided that a national conference could galvanize interest from industry in more community involvement in development on community managed lands. This conference came to be known as Ecotourism at the Crossroads. It was funded by KWS and managed by KWS and TIES. I remember feeling a pretty weighty obligation, when I arrived in Kenya on a pre‐conference visit and found that KWS had made their bush aircraft available to us, to allow our small team immediate access to meetings with communities in pivotal regions of Kenya, from Laikipia, to Maasai Mara to Amboseli, to determine the best means of organizing meaningful workshops and develop the agenda for the national forum. In communities throughout Kenya we found that there was a hunger for more opportunity to become genuine partners in the ecotourism development process. The conference generated vital dialog between international experts, industry and local communities that helped empower communities to lay out their own terms on the partnerships they sought.

Epler Wood on a conference visit in Kenya.

By the end of 1998, TIES had galvanized national forums on community benefits from ecotourism in two landmark countries, Ecuador and Kenya. It had published far‐reaching documents and discussions on methods to improve practices of both private businesses and donors. Enterprises and programs that would make ecotourism culturally, socially and economically successful for local people were increasingly being financed and developed. Costas Christ wrote in Volume 2 of the TIES text, A Guide for Planners and Managers, “the days are gone when one wondered whether adopting the principles of
ecotourism could make tourism become a catalyst for nature conservation and community
development. There is, finally, ample evidence that this is true.”

Read more: Community Ecotourism on the Frontiers of Global Development Part 2

Part 1 – Ecotourism 20 Years Ago

Part 2 – Ecotourism Now

The business of ecotourism has not changed dramatically in 20 years, though it has expanded globally. Businesses around the world have increasingly adopted ecotourism principles in an effort to create more low-impact and greener tourism opportunities. This social and environmental business model has continued to prove viable for companies around the world.

In 1994, South Africa emerged from apartheid and became one of the most dynamic and innovative countries in the world for ecotourism, bringing a wide array of new tourism companies to the fore. Firms like Wilderness Safaris began to spread their wings, developing massive regions for wildlife viewing, with goals to conserve wild lands and benefit local people. Wilderness Safaris presently operates privately on 6.5 million acres of land in southern Africa with 60 lodges and camps.

They are partnering with wilderness conservancies and concessioning properties while maintaining strong partnerships with local communal organizations. They manage hundreds of staff in Botswana, Namibia, Malawi, South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and the Seychelles. In Namibia alone, they have provided entry-level guide training to over 1,000 local people in the last six years. Wildlife conservation is being supported via a portion of guest revenues that are allocated to benefit such efforts as Namibia’s Save the Rhino Trust.

International Expeditions (IE), one of TIES’s earliest supporting companies, was sold to a larger firm in 2000 and then sold again. Steve Cox, the company co-founder, relates that after the first sale the company was not immediately able to continue its investments in environmental conservation and social well-being; but when the TUI group of companies took over, the commitment to sustainable development was greater than ever before.

IE continues forward with a corporate social responsibility program of some magnitude in the Iquitos, Peru region with the local NGO CONAPAC. In the 1990s, IE launched a variety of headline-grabbing rainforest learning and exploration programs near Iquitos, including one of the first canopy walkways in the Americas and seminars on the rainforest which were covered by science magazines worldwide.

The commitment to Iquitos’ regional population grew out of the company’s investment in conserving the rainforest. They are presently reaching 200 villages with school supplies, water treatment kits to purify the untreated downstream effluent from the city of Iquitos, and on-going environmental education programs for children – a program they created and have been building upon for nearly 20 years.

They now also assist local enterprises, leveraging microloans to create small-scale bakeries and other nutritional food products for sale to local residents. An entire regional trading system has emerged built upon the greater good, according to IE co-founder Steve Cox. He explains, “an economy has emerged that benefits from tourism but is not dependent on it. The villages are now creating an ever growing set of products that can also be sold in the burgeoning city of Iquitos.” Cox calls this a “micro-economic civilization.”

In the Caribbean, Stanley Selengut’s Maho Bay Camps became a network of lodges, which grew to include a state of the art group of apartment-style rooms on Maho’s grounds, called Harmony Studios, which were solar powered and built from recycled materials. Estate Concordia’s Eco-tents and new Eco-studios followed soon after. The Selengut model has always been to create simple and affordable accommodations with new technologies, such as the Eco-panels that he has incorporated into the new Eco-studios.

Maho Bay Camps’ Harmony Studio (Photo by Maho Bay Camps)

As part of their commitment to TIES, Richard Ryel served as Chairman of the Board from 1997-2002; Kurt Kutay and Stanley Selengut were both board members for significant periods of time. These ecotourism pioneers and others shaped a model that has now incorporated a much larger industry, driving innovation and bringing to light the importance of incorporating sustainability principles in all of tourism.

As Stanley, Kurt, Richard and others worked closely with TIES, they demanded that the industry take note of principles that would not only help it be green, but also to grow and attract markets that were seeking experiences that brought them into better harmony with the environment, greater support of wildlife and wild lands, more commitment to local well-being, and a greater understanding of the world they lived in. This legacy remains today.

More about the Author

Megan Epler Wood founded The International Ecotourism Society (TIES) in 1990, the oldest and largest non-profit organization in the world dedicated to making ecotourism a tool for sustainable tourism development worldwide. She was its President & CEO from 1991-2002. Since 2003, Megan’s firm EplerWood International has devoted itself to aiding some of the poorest countries in the world with sustainable tourism development, including the nations of Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Sierra Leone, Mexico, El Salvador, Brazil, and Honduras.

Her published works includes; Ecotourism: Principles, Practices and Policies for Sustainability for UNEP in 2002. She has lectured at Columbia Business School, Harvard University, Wellesley, Duke University, University of Vermont, and The George Washington University. She was named a Senior Fellow at the Institute at the Golden Gate in 2010 where she is developing next generation thinking on the development of tourism as a sustainable economic development tool in collaboration with leading universities, NGOs, and business professionals.

Part 1 – Ecotourism 20 Years Ago

Before ecotourism emerged, adventure travel was already 10 years old and counting. After rafting, mountain trekking and climbing in Africa and Latin America took off in the 70s, ecotourism businesses began to test out trips with more “nerdy” international ecology themes popularized in the 80s. Most early ecotourism pioneers carried binoculars, watched birds as second nature, and could be found crawling on the ground to observe insects and mushrooms more often than scaling dramatic peaks.

A bird-watching guide in Kenya (Photo: Megan Epler Wood)

Ecotourism entrepreneurs grafted their own interest in wildlife and ecology to the growing market for specialty travel, and tapped a client base that was ready to see the world’s last undisturbed ecosystems. From the early ships of the Sven and Lars Lindblad, who pioneered Antarctica travel, to the first tours to view wildlife from boats in the Galapagos, ecotourism was a phenomenon from day one that drove many to claim it was the fastest growing market for niche travel in the world by the mid-1990s.

According to Richard Ryel, co-founder of International Expeditions (IE) and former Chairman of the Board of TIES, early adventure and nature travel pioneers shared business information to help build more symbiosis and greater market share. Surprisingly, they found only a “5% overlap” in target clientele, even though their demographics were very similar, with the Antarctic being one place where adventure and ecotourism markets merged.

Ecotourism has always attracted a loyal clientele of nature enthusiasts, who were more than willing to pay to see wildlife. Pioneers like Ryel and IE co-founder Steve Cox, created a sturdy enterprise model that opened new destinations, such as Belize, where travelers could quickly see toucans, Mayan tombs, morpho butterflies and parrot fish all in a 10 day expedition. Kurt Kutay, an environmental science major who launched Wildland Adventures, was soon finding that trips to animal-rich parks like Manuel Antonio in Costa Rica, were gold. His business became a mecca for travelers interested in birds, wildlife and culture – particularly the warm Costa Rican “Ticos”, who had a knack for making visitors feel like part of the family.

Meanwhile, Stanley Selengut of Maho Bay Camps in the US Virgin Islands was already proselytizing around the world about his low-tech, low-impact green model for hotels. Stanley was never shy about discussing the “amazing profits” his firm was earning from simple tents on platforms by a sugary sand beach on St. John. And, he was the first to point out that travelers frequently care more about simplicity than they do about luxury, which as far as he was concerned, only improved the profit margins.

Maho Bay Camps, St. John, US Virgin Islands (Photo by Maho Bay Camps)

These pioneers and their many partners around the world helped to create what Arthur Frommer described as the “New Age of Travel,” a book first published in 1989. Frommer, the dean of American travel writers, described mass tourism as “dead.” His book described hundreds of unique experiences, which each traveler could tap, even before the Internet, and experience “authenticity.” The new age of travel was about helping travelers to emerge from bus tours and introducing them directly to cultures, society, landscape and wild lands.

The ecotourism business pioneers knew instinctively that their focus should be on wildlife. But it had to be charismatic wildlife, like mountain gorillas, which were becoming available to view for the first time in history thanks to intensive research by wildlife biologists. As the field of wildlife science advanced, it became feasible to see ecosystems with increasing insights into animal behavior and the most intimate secrets of wildlife survival.

Darwin’s laboratory on the Galapagos was attracting 40,000 tourists by 1991 with rapid increases in demand already raising concerns in the conservation community. Here, visitors could learn why birds became flightless and land-based iguanas became sea creatures.

“Welcome to the Galapagos” (Photo by Megan Epler Wood)

The African plains were converted into a huge observatory for tourists to view the annual drama of millions of wildebeest migrating across the Serengeti. In Asia, India was showing off the exclusive wildlife preserves where the maharajahs had once hunted, and the endangered Bengal tiger could be photographed hunting chital deer at dusk.

The early ecotourism pioneers sought to bring these dramatic experiences to average, middle class travelers and remove barriers between people and places. They quickly formed partnerships with local business people in countries around the world, bringing first hand information to their clients on wildlife and culture. A network of inbound operators, who provided the large majority of the know-how and services at the local level, became the foundation of the ecotourism business model.

In Costa Rica, local businesses Horizontes and Costa Rica Expeditions were the founders of an ever-growing number of enterprises, which provided sensitive, in-depth experiences with Tico culture and excellent wildlife viewing. In Ecuador, long-time operators such as Metropolitan and Canodros, who made their fortunes running ships in the Galapagos, began to expand to the “Oriente“, or the Amazonian region of Ecuador, where new jungle lodges quickly emerged. Local businesses, like Nuevo Mundo and Tropic, launched tours based solely on Ecuador’s native culture and biodiversity.

In Peru, Machu Picchu became the launch point for more in-depth explorations of native cultures and the far reaches of the country’s extraordinary Manu and Tambopata reserves with companies like Rainforest Expeditions, founded by a team of young Peruvians in 1989.

Kapawi Ecolodge, Ecuador (Photo by CANODROS)

All of these businesses were among the first to support the founding of The International Ecotourism Society (TIES). These entrepreneurs had no doubt that tourism was not only a business, but also a mechanism to create a greener earth. While ecotourism grew quickly, questions were immediately raised about the appropriate management of this burgeoning market and TIES was seen as the mechanism to get management protocols in place.

They supported the creation of one of TIES’s earliest documents, Ecotourism Guidelines for Nature Tour Operators, first published in 1993. These seminal industry guidelines were formulated in three interdisciplinary meetings held in San Francisco, San Jose, Costa Rica, and Washington D.C., with participation from NGOs, tour operators, and academics. The guidelines emphasized visitor information and education and staff training to ensure visitors are fully informed of how to prevent their own impacts.

A cottage industry of guidelines and standards for tourism began to blossom based on these early efforts, with nearly one hundred certification programs launched by the end of the 1990s. But with all this, the business pioneers remained focused on creating educational tour programs, keeping their numbers manageable, providing the best guides, and working towards a low impact style which also allowed travelers to understand the places they were visiting. Their tours began in the early morning with wake up calls before dawn to see birds, and ended with fireside chats with local guides explaining culture at night.

The number-one hallmark of early ecotourism was its focus on quality local guides. Guiding in countries like Ecuador and Costa Rica became a science and an art form. Local guides had to speak good English, recognize birds in Spanish, English and Latin, and feel comfortable explaining local cultures. As tours delved into the rain forest and spread out on the savannah, the opportunity to appropriately meet and understand indigenous groups became a highly important focus, from the Maasai of Kenya to the Cofan of Ecuador.

Local tour guide, Ecuador (Photo by Megan Epler Wood)

Increasingly, members of these indigenous groups were trained and became local guides, and locally owned cooperative enterprises, like RICANCIE in Ecuador, took off. (More will be covered on community enterprise in the next column.) In all cases, the interpretation of wildlife and culture was the means to creating an experience for visitors that would leave them moved by what they had learned, and changed by what they had experienced.

Read more: Business Pioneers Forge Green Tourism Models Part 2 – Ecotourism Now

Part 1 – Ecotourism 20 Years Ago

Part 2 – Ecotourism Now

Twenty years later in 2010, the funding crisis for protected areas remains. The hard work of getting funding mechanisms into place via government policies has advanced slowly.

Recent news is not encouraging. Parks and protected areas around the world face a growing crisis to cover the costs of their operation and management. It is estimated that at least $ 12-13 billion will be needed in the next decade to mange protected areas in developing countries according to IUCN World Congress documents in 2005. Parks have long been one of the main attractions for the tourism industry, and this trend continues to increase. But most decision makers remain woefully unaware of the economic importance of parks.

IUCN’s 2008 World Congress focused on creating market viable ecotourism products. In this exact same time period, the international adventure and related ecotourism industry was having one of its greatest boom periods in history. Businesses were bringing record numbers of visitors to parks, and yes entrance fees were being raised around the world. But few efforts to finance yawning budget gaps with tourism were implemented on the scale required. While park budgets reach crisis proportions, the tourism marketplace is kept at arm’s length by park administrators.

Nevertheless, real progress has been made. The national parks of South Africa launched a concession program that has been economically, socially, and environmentally successful, according to Gigu Varghese, the head of business development for South African National parks (SANParks) as reported in the book Responsible Tourism. SANParks manages over 4 million hectares of pristine wilderness in a system of 23 national parks. After the democratization of South Africa in 1994, the government became answerable to a much larger population and their economic needs.

In 1998, SANParks was told to prepare to become less dependent on government funding. In 2000, private operators were given the legal right to operate in 11 sites with 20-year contracts, a public-private approach known as concessions, which yielded over $14 million to SANParks in 5 years. Stringent environmental standards were applied and local employment was generated, all carefully monitored and scored to ensure that black populations were a prime beneficiary of the effort.

Concessions are a government contracting instrument with a solid history. The first concession arrangements for parks in the world were authorized by the US National Park Service after its founding in 1916. But only recently has it been fully demonstrated that this type of contract can also include environmental and social goals. According to IUCN author, Derek de La Harpe, in his chapter for the IUCN book Parks in Transition; park agencies, often with strong qualifications in biological issues, frequently lack the managerial, financial and commercial skills, resources and mindsets needed to oversee businesses. Most park agencies still resist working with the private sector.

Oliver Hillel, of the Secretariat for the Convention on Biological Diversity, states, “The vast majority of national park agencies still are unprepared to partner productively with the tourism industry. Building the capacity of park agencies and local authorities to engage with tourism industry representatives could easily result in doubling current economic benefits from tourism to protected areas.”

Tourism concessions worth billions of dollars in new revenues for conservation could help to bridge the funding gap for parks around the world. Businesses are willing to pay governments for the opportunity to operate in parks and protected areas; and concession contracts that require strong environmental and social standards are entirely feasible.

The time has come to truly finance parks through tourism concessions. Hard work to create the legal mechanisms and management capacity is required, but the vision is clear. After 20 years, it appears that tourism is still the prime candidate to help pay for parks around the world.

More about the Author

Megan Epler Wood founded The International Ecotourism Society (TIES) in 1990, the oldest and largest non-profit organization in the world dedicated to making ecotourism a tool for sustainable tourism development worldwide. She was its President & CEO from 1991-2002. Since 2003, Megan’s firm EplerWood International has devoted itself to aiding some of the poorest countries in the world with sustainable tourism development, including the nations of Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Sierra Leone, Mexico, El Salvador, Brazil, and Honduras.

Her published works includes; Ecotourism: Principles, Practices and Policies for Sustainability for UNEP in 2002. She has lectured at Columbia Business School, Harvard University, Wellesley, Duke University, University of Vermont, and The George Washington University. She was named a Senior Fellow at the Institute at the Golden Gate in 2010 where she is developing next generation thinking on the development of tourism as a sustainable economic development tool in collaboration with leading universities, NGOs, and business professionals.

Part 1 – Ecotourism 20 Years Ago

In 1989, hundreds of thousands of acres were being added to park systems to conserve ecosystems around the world. International conservation was going into high gear, driven by the rude fact that development was accelerating in the most vulnerable and biodiverse regions of the planet. Conservationists were talking more about preserving the Amazonian rain forest, and less about “saving the panda.”

As conservation objectives were being ramped up, parks had jumped from being places for family recreation to becoming a global tool to preserve the last “great” endangered places. Costa Rica was winning awards for conserving the highest percentage of park land in the world. But, the large majority of new protected areas worldwide were simply lines delineated on maps. These under protected areas and fledgling parks became known as paper parks.

While conservationists were thinking big, there was, unfortunately, little funding on the ground. There was vision, and conservationists were quick to start raising funds to make these fledgling parks real. But national budgets were short and economic resources within park agencies exceedingly tight. Economic activity in these biodiverse zones was usually ranching, forestry and mining, or subsistence agriculture; none of which were park friendly.

But despite these economic and social realities at the time, parks were already attracting substantial economic activity and foreign exchange in developing countries, because of tourism. The idea of using tourism as a means to finance parks began take off in the mid-1980s.

The nature tourism market was vibrant and growing rapidly. Latin American countries in the tropics are home to about 1000 species of birds, most of which cannot be observed in North America. Word spread from scientific stations to expatriate families, to friends in Europe and North America, to global tourism markets. The story was exciting. Rainforests are teeming with birds and wildlife, and visitors could experience some of the last great preserved sanctuaries on earth. They were no longer just uncomfortable, mosquito-ridden “jungles.”

In Africa, tourists were starting to swarm into wildlife parks. For many years, the preserves there had been the refuge only of the wealthy who could afford the luxury of a private safari. But by the 1980s, safaris had gone mass market. Thousands of tourists were visiting Kenya and paying relatively little for the opportunity. Tour buses were filling Amboseli National Park and Masai Mara Reserve, and lions and cheetah were being surrounded routinely.

The Founding of TIES

In 1989, I was working as an independent filmmaker with my own company, Ecoventures, specializing in environmental documentaries. I convinced the National Audubon Society to produce an hour-long documentary on ecotourism for television. The funding covered production in Kenya, Belize and Montana.

With a serious budget, I researched every aspect of how tourism was providing income to parks and quickly discovered the most articulate advocate for using tourism to finance parks was Dr. David Western. Known as Jonah by all his friends and colleagues, Western was the head of the Wildlife Conservation Center program of the New York Zoological Society (NYZS) in East Africa.

The son of a game warden, he was field seasoned from birth, had a wickedly smart ability to sum up key points, and had long been a strong advocate community-based conservation. This led him to be one of the earliest advocates for ecotourism. We met twice, once for an audio tape interview at the Central Park Zoo in New York City, and once in Amboseli National Park with a whole film crew. After the shoot, I asked if I could make a private visit to discuss an idea with him, and he invited me to his home.

The idea I presented was the founding of The Ecotourism Society (later to become The International Ecotourism Society). Sitting in front of an African water hole, having tea at Western’s house overlooking Nairobi National Park, I made my pitch. I would be the point person, and he would be my chairman. He agreed and TIES was born.

Back in Washington, books were being written about the potential for tourism to fund parks. Elizabeth Boo of WWF-US wrote, Ecotourism: Potentials and Pitfalls, which caught the eye of conservationists around the world. Karen Ziffer, a Stanford MBA who was snatched up by Conservation International, wrote the second work Ecotourism, The Uneasy Alliance; laying out the challenge for ecotourism to both fund local conservation and fuel economic development.

During the production of the Audubon film, I held meetings on the potential of an international organization dedicated to ecotourism. Boo, Ziffer and I were the core working group. World Resources Institute economist Kreg Lindberg soon joined us, and Ecoventures’ marketing director Frances Gatz worked on outreach. When Western joined forces with us, funds were raised and in 1990 the new organization was founded.

The idea of an international organization dedicated to making ecotourism a tool for conservation and sustainable development was new. It was the first organization in the world to dedicate all of its resources to tourism as a sustainable development mechanism.

Funding to launch came with two grants (which Western and I raised together) from the Liz Claiborne Art Ortenberg Foundation and the Merck Family Fund. The organization’s goals were set out by its first board of directors in its first meeting in May of 1990. And the first definition for the concept of ecotourism that incorporated sustainable development ideas was coined: “responsible travel to natural areas that conserve the environment and sustain the well being of local people.”

With a definition in hand we went to work. But ecotourism had few organizing principles and could not be called a professional discipline. It was merely a very interesting, and ever controversial idea. With every year, we brought more expertise together, attracted thousands of members in countries across the planet, and slowly but surely laid out a set of professional methodologies and guidelines. Lessons have been learned, and the market for ecotourism has grown. But its role as a financing engine for parks remains nascent.

Read more: Ecotourism Society Launched in 1990 to Assist Parks Part 2 – Ecotourism Now