TOURISM RECREATION RESEARCH VOL.

25(1), 2000: 31-40

Jubilee Volume

Tourism in the Most Fragile Environments

RALF BUCKLEY
Fragility implies that small impacts cause serious damage. In practice, the most fragile environments are wilderness areas with the least
previous disturbance. Tourism is growing globally, wilderness is shrinking, and more tourism is occurring in wilderness areas. Tourism
can help conserve wilderness if it displaces more damaging land uses such as logging, but this is rare. Commonly, tourism benefits from
wilderness conservation without contributing to it. Most tourism in wilderness occurs in areas already reserved for conservation. The
current unprecedenkd scale of recreational use creates significant environmental impacts and converts wilderness reserves to recreational
playgrounds. Impacts differ enormously for different activities and ecosystems. Noise, weeds and pathogens pose greater risks in tropical
forests than alpine herbfield; trampling much lesser. Easy-to-study impacts such as trampling have been quantified experimentally in a
range of ecosystems. Hard-to-measure impacts such as disturbance to cryptic fauna, and microbiological impacts on water quality, are
little-studied. There are few studies which quantify tourism activity and ecosystem impact with equal precision, and even fewer which
measure the effectiveness of visitor management tools in reducing impacts. Most parks use a toolkit of visitor management techniques,
including quotas; zoning; permits; restrictions on particular activities and equipment; education and interpretation; and techniques to
harden the environment against impacts. Eduqtion is cheapest, but its effectiveness is uncertain. Restrictions work, but are politically
difficult. Hardening is easiest, but most expensive, and the end of wilderness. It is therefore increasingly urgent to allocate other public
lands to the burgeoning nature tourism industry, so that recreation in wilderness can be restricted to minimal-impact activities, and
nature tourism can continue to grow in less fragile environments.

The sector of the tourism industry which relies on
natural environments is growing rapidly worldwide, and
much of this growth is occurring in the most fragile
environments. Here I argue firstly for improved monitoring
and management, and second for access by the nature
tourism industry to other public lands, to re~uce pressure
on national parks and other fragile areas.
Tourism is a huge global industry. If commercial travel
is included, it is perhaps the world's largest. It is a major
component of many local and national economies. It is a
major so.cial phenomenon in richer nations, and a major
social force between nations and between people. It has
been seen as an agent for peace, an agent of social
disruption, a means for transferring money from richer to
poorer nations, a form of neo-colonialism, a mechanism to
fund conservation, or a Trojan horse which infiltrates
destructive industrial development into the world's few
remaining wildernesses. No doubt all these perceptions
may be accurate, on occasion.
A key component in most tourism is change: a change
in scenery, in tastes, in lifestyle, in surroundings, in
companions; a change from the workaday, for recreation
in its literal sense. As the world's population becomes
increasingly urbanized, and day-to-day access to natural
environments increasingly rare for most people, this
demand for change has made nature tourism an
increasingly important component of the global tourism
industry, and one which continues to grow.
Nature tourism and the NEAT sector
Most of the more affluent members of current
generations have lived and worked entirely in cities since
childhood. Natural environments, wildflowers and
wildlife, remote areas and outdoor sports are presented to
them via the mass media as products available for
consumption by the privileged. Lacking outdoors skills
themselves, they rely increasingly on professional outdoor
guides and tour operators to provide a nature tourism
experience. For these people, the natural environment is
not simply a component of their childhood countryside, but
a single global nature tourism market with named and
branded destination points, which are perceived in a
hierarchy of preferences determined largely by marketing
and associated mass media information (Buckley 1999a).
This can lead to major and rapid shifts in visitor
numbers. A generation ago, people visited-the countryside
near where they lived, using private transport and their
own equipment. International icon destinations, such as
Yellowstone National Park in the USA, were few. The
world's remaining wilderness areas were much larger than
they are at present, and visitor numbers were smaller and
did not change rapidly. Now, however, a small shift in the
popularity of a particular park, through intentional or
inadvertent promotion within the global tour.ism industry,
can produce a very large increa~,e in visitor numbers in a
very short space of time.

©2000 Tourism Recreation Research

Tourism in the Most Fragile Environments : R. Buckley
Of course, commercial tourists are not the only people
visiting remote areas and fragile environments. Local
residents visiting these areas for work or recreation still
make up a significant proportion of visitor numbers in most
cases. It is commercial nature and adventure tourism,
however, that has grown most rapidly in recent years; and
it is commercial tour operators who place the greatest
pressure on park and land managers for increased
infrastructure, accommodation and organized activities.
The specialist ecotourism sector, with a particular
focus on best-practice environmental management, an
educational component and some direct or indirect
contrib~tion to conservation of the natural environment,
has grown in parallel with the overall growth in nature
tourism and outdoor adventure recreation (Buckley 1994,
Lindberg & McKercher 1997, Wall1997). The distinctions
between nature tourism, outdoor recreation, outdoor
education, adventure travel and ecotourism are becoming
increasingly blurred. In aggregate, however, the nature,
eco and adventure tourism (NEAT) sector is well-defined
and supports a large industry of specialist agents, operators,
guides and equipment manufacturers and suppliers. Whilst
ecotourism as strictly defined is difficult to quantify in
economic terms without detailed audit of individual tours,
the NEAT sector as a whole is relatively well defined and
can be recognized simply on the basis of geographical areas
and types of product offered, which are listed in tour-
company marketing materials (Buckley in press).
The NEAT sector now makes up a very significant
proportion of the overall tourism industry in many
countries. In countries which are known as scenic or nature
tourism destinations, such as New Zealand and many of
the nations of east and southern Africa and south and central
America, essentially the entire tourism market lies within
the NEAT sector. In the USA, the NEAT sector is worth
about US$ 220 billion per year, or about half of the total
tourism economy (Mallett 1998). In Australia, it is estimated
that the turnover by NEAT suppliers makes up at least a
quarter or a third of the total tourism industry turnover,
i.e. about A$ 7-15 billion annually (Buckley in press). A
survey of international visitors to Australia indicates that
the total expenditure of those who took part in nature
tourism was about $6.6 billion in 1995 (Blarney and Hatch
1998).
The entire NEAT sector relies on access by the
commercial tourism industry to natural environments,
notably national parks and other protected areas and public
wilderness lands. Whilst a large proportion of this tourist
activity is in relatively small high-use areas around
roadheads, visitor centres, and other tourist facilities, this
32
in turn has displaced wilderness users into more distant
backcountry areas, increasing the level of use even in the
most remote and formerly unfrequented regions. In
addition, increases in people and traffic typically lead to
effects such as increased noise, water pollution, and the
spread of weeds and pathogens, which extend well beyond
the localised high-use area.
Where does nature tourism take place?
Nature tourism tends to be focussed in areas of high
conservation value; because rare species, high biodiversity,
unusual ecosystems and undisturbed environments all act
as tourist attractions; and because the main natural
environments accessible for t9urism are those in protected
public lands such as national parks and heritage areas.
Historically, the principal human impacts on natural
environments have been from other industry sectors: in
many countries, ecosystem types which were once
widespread have disappeared completely as a result of
clearance for agriculture and urban development, or have
been modified irretrievably through grazing, forestry
operations and spread of weeds and feral animals.
In the developed western nations, relatively
undisturbed natural environments attractive to tourism are
distributed between national parks and other conservation
reserves, public forests and other public lands, and in some
cases also private freehold and leasehold land held by
ranchers and graziers, or in private hunting preserves. In
developing nations, in contrast, areas with high nature
tourism potential may be owned by national governments,
traditional owners, subsistence farmers or transnational
corporations.
In l~ss developed nations, private nature tourism
operators often buy their own land, because land is
relatively cheap. In addition, many operators buy their land
primarily for conservation, with tourism as a means to fund
management. In the developed nations, tour operators rely
largely on public lands such as national parks, because these
are the only remaining lands with high value for nature
tourism. They use public lands as a basis for private
businesses; and relatively few contribute directly to
conservation of the natural areas concerned. Parks are also
critical. for nature tourism in some developing nations,
notably those with a long colonial history of safari tourism
in east and southern Africa, and the heavily-populated
nations of Asia where competition for land is intense.
Types of nature tourism
Nature-based tourism involves a very wide range of
human development and activities, from large-scale
Tourism Recreation Research Vol. 25, No.1, 2000

integrated resorts as big as a small town, to a single visit by
a single minimal-impact hiker or bushwalker. Large-scale
integrated resorts are particularly common in mountain and
coastal areas, "Xhere the natural environment and scenery
provide a setting for nature and adventure tourism on a
mass scale. A single resort may have 50-100,000 visitors at
a time; typically, 5 or 10 times as many visitors as permanent
residents. Beyond this scale, resorts develop into entire
tourist towns such as Hawaii's Waikiki, Australia's Gold
Coast or Colorado's Vail, where nature has long since been
overtaken by urban development, and town planning and
infrastructure are run by municipal authorities rather than
resort owners.
On a smaller scale, nature-based tourism
accommodation in and around national parks and similar
areas ranges from hotels, chalets, guesthouses and lodges,
bed and breakfast establishments, national parks huts and
campgrounds, to single-use bush camps and bivouacs.
Tourists may travel by plane, helicopter, balloon, boat, raft,
kayak, coach, 4WD, car, snowmobile, cycle, horse, or on
foot. Infrastructure associated with accommodation, tours
and other tourist activities includes marinas, golf courses,
ski lifts, roads, vehicle tracks, carparks, bridges, toilets,
showers, water taps, barbeques, trashcans, tables, walking
tracks, duckboards, lookouts, platforms, stairs, ladders,
railings, hides and many more (Buckley and Pannell1990,
Buckley 1999a). Each of these has its own suite of
environmental impacts, and all of these impacts depend
on the ways in which such infrastructure is constructed and
operated, as well as its precise location and design.
Which are the most fragile environments?
The concept of a fragile environment is useful but
potentially ambiguous. Fragile means breakable: that is,
fragility implies that a relatively small exter.nal stress or
impact will produce a major or catastrophic change for the
worse. Fragility, in other words, refers to a stress-response
framework; the response of the natural environment to
human activity. Different ecosystems are fragile in different
ways: i.e., different human activities produce different
changes relative to background, in different environmental
parameters in different ecosystems (Buckley 1998, 1999b).
There is no general ranking or hierarchy of ecosystems in
terms of overall fragility.
Ecosystems which have already been modified heavily
by human use tend to be more resilient to additional stress,
simply because most of the ecosystem components and
functions which provided their original conservation value
have already disappeared. For relativ.ely undisturbed
ecosystems, ·it is possible to compare their fragility as
Tourism Recreation Research Vol. 25, No.1, 2000
Tourism in the Most Fragile Environments: R. Buckley
measured by a single indicator in response to a single type
of impact; but not overall, since different indicators and
impacts vary in significance betw~en ecosystems. Rivers
with high streamflow volume, and high natural turbidity
and a sandy streambed, for example, are less fragile to
turbid runoff from soil erosion than low-volume, low-
turbidity creeks with rocky streambeds. Fish species in the
former, however, maybe more sensitive to a change in
temperature than those in the latter. There are many similar
examples.
In a tourism context, therefore, assessing the fragility
of a natural environment involves at least three distinct
issues:
• What makes the environment valuable for
conservation purposes, and what indicator parameters
can be used to measure changes?
• What types of tourist activity are occurring or
proposed?
• How do the environmental indicators respond to
changes in the activity, and what monitoring
programme is needed to assess the stress-response
relationship reliably?
Differences between ecosystems
As noted above, almost any relatively undisturbed
environment can be considered fragile to at least some of
the impacts of some type of tourism development. There
are far too many ecosystems to enumerate in detail, but
some examples may illustrate the range of variation.
Tropical and subtropical sandy coastlines, for example,
may support specialist coastal dune vegetation
incorporating rare plant and animal species, where the
stability of the entire ecosystem is critically dependent on
an intact vegetation cover to prevent windblown soil
erosion. Such ecosystems are easily damaged by off-road
vehicles, and are often also susceptible to invasion by woody
weeds. Closer to the ocean, the shape of the sandy beach
itself is resilient to use by off-road vehicles, but burrowing
crabs, which commonly live in sandy beaches, are crushed
when the vehicles drive over their burrows. Nesting
seabirds and marine turtles are also easily disturbed, which
has major consequences for the maintenance of viable
breeding populations.
In many areas, therefore, birds and turtles nest on
offshore sand islands where they are protected from land-
based predators, but not from predatory birds such as gulls
and skuas. A single tourist boat visiting such an island
33
Touris'll in the Most Fragile Env?ronments : R. Buckley
during nesting season can cause a massive increase in egg
and chick mortality, as the presence of humans causes
nesting seabirds to relax their vigilance over their offspring,
many of whom are quickly killed by ever-watchful
predators.
In areas with a low tidal range, even quite small low
offshore sand islands can support a relatively complex
vegetation; but this is critically dependent on a groundwater
lens, a body of fresh water held in the island's sediments,
floating on ocean water beneath and renewed periodically
by rainfall from above. If tourism development on the
island taps this ground water for human use, the underlying
salt water may rise rapidly into the root zone of trees,
leading to large-scale vegetation death.
In mobile sand-dune deserts, soil disturbance by
passing vehicles may be of little concern as long as it does
not crush vegetation; but in sandy deserts stabilised by a
surface layer of pebbles or a cryptogamic crust, even a single
pass by a vehicle can leave an impression that lasts many
d~cades. Vegetation in some ecosystems is particularly
susceptible to specific pathogens, for example, the cinnamon
fungus or jarrah dieback disease in parts of Australia. Most
Australian vegetation types, on the other hand, are relatively
resilient to fire; whereas elsewhere, a single fire may have
a devastating and long-lasting effect on an entire ecosystem.
Trampling by hikers may have a major impact on the
steep and sparsely-vegetated scree slopes in northern
hemisphere arctic-alpine environments. In tropical and
subtropical rainforests, however, off-track hikers are far
more likely to be damaged by stinging trees and thorny
vines than to cause erosion in the springy organic soils with
their dense and rapidly turned-over litter layer. On the
other hand, ground-foraging birds and other native wildlife
in these rainforests will often move permanently away from
areas where human voices are heard, even intermittently
and at low volume; whereas on a high and uninhabited
mountain peak, climbers can shout to their hearts' content
without it disturbing anyone but each ol:her.
The small self-contained lakes and pools of alpine and
subalpine environments, and indeed also the waterholes
of desert environments, are extreme vulnerable to water
quality impacts such as runoff contaminated with human
waste, residues from personal insect repellents, or even the
disturbance associated with recreational swill).ming. Larger
and more eutrophic lakes and oceans, in contrast, generally
exhibit a much smaller response to a similar level of impact.
Clearly, these examples are but a small selection from
an almost indefinitely large range. The critical issue is that
the sensitivity or fragility of different parts of a single
34
ecosystem can differ widely; the fragility of a single
ecosystem to different types of tourist activity can differ
widely; and the fragility of different ecosystems to a similar
tourist activity can differ widely.
For the planning and management of nature tourism,
therefore, the first broad-scale determinant of fragility is
simply the degree to which the environment concerned has
already been disturbed by human activity. In many
countries, this aspect is closely lirked with conservation
status: the only undisturbed environments are those in
conservation reserves.
For detailed planning of particular tourist activities,
however, a generic concept of fragility is of little use; we
need to know what particular components or functions of
the ecosystem are of greatest concern or value; what types
of human impacts, direct or indirect, these components are
more likely to be susceptible to; and which of these impacts,
at what intensity, would be produced by various potential
tourism development proposals, under different
environmental management regimes (Buckley 1994).
Impact Types and Management Issues
Nature tourism can produce a wide range of
environmental impacts (Liddle 1998; Sun and Walsh 1998;
Buckley in press b). These impacts may span almost all
components of the natural environment. Some common
examples include:
• soil erosion and compaction, which can generate
airborne particulate pollution, increased stream
turbidity, reductions in or modifications of plant cover
and regeneration, and ground and surface water
infiltration and percolation, sometimes leading in turn
to slope slumping and landslides
• direct vegetation damage through clearance,
trampling, cutting and breakage, firewood collection,
etc., and indirect vegetation modification through, for
example, changes to fire regime; introduction of weeds
and plant pathogens; trampling, grazing, browsing
and manure from pack animals and riding horses; and
indirect competitive interactions between native and
introduced plants, e.g. through competition for insect
pollinators, and changes in the populations of
herbivorous and parasitic insects
• direct impacts dn wildlife through hunting and fishing,
habitat modification, noise, visual disturbance,
road kill, channels and barriers to migrations and local
movements, etc; indirect impacts through, for
example, stress-related disease, changed energetic
Tourism Recreation Research Vol. 25, No. 1, 2000

balance in cold climates, increased territorial
interactions, introduction of parasites on riding and
pack animals, predation and disturbance of native
wildlife by pet dogs, and so on
• changes to ground and surface water quality and
hydrology, including streamflow patterns, turbidity,
pH, dissolved oxygen, nutrients, microorganisms and
a wide range of synthetic chemicals such as pesticides
and cleaning materials.
Nature tourism can also produce a range of social and
cultural impacts. Whilst these are beyond the scope of.this
contribution, it is worth noting that the least modified and
most fragile native cultures often occur in some of the least
modified and most fragile natural environments, especially
in remote areas. Tourism in these are::~s, whether attracted
by nature or culture or both, can cause rapid disintegration
of traditional lifestyles, languages, religious beliefs, cultural
practices, social mores and economic systems, as well as
introducing disease. Typically, some of the people affected
resent and resist such changes and others embrace and
hasten them; but· either way, these changes represent
impacts.
As well as varying in scale from large resorts to
individual backpackers, impacts on the natural
environment vary in type from relatively coarse effects such
as vegetation clearance or sewage discharges, to extremely
fine and subtle effects such as changes in plant pollination
ecology, changes in animal physiology or behaviour, and
changes in the assemblages of waterborne microorganisms.
Many of these are invisible to the naked eye and can only
be detected with relatively sophisticated scientific sampling,
sometimes involving specialists and expensive equipment;
but they may often be more significant, for critical
conservation values of the area concerned, than the more
gross and obvious impacts.
Despite a significant volume of research on easy-to-
observe first-order impacts (Liddle 1998, Buckley in press
b) our overall understanding of the environmental impacts
of tourism is extremely sketchy, for several reasons. Firstly,
most studies have been carried out on impacts which are
easy to quantify, such as loss of vegetation cover following
trampling, even though in most ecosystems this is a rather
insignificant ecological issue. Very few studies have
attempted to identify and monitor the most critical indicator
parameters for the ecosystem and tourist activity concerned.
Secondly, few studies have adequately quantified both
the applied stress and the ecosystem response. Ideally, we
need to measure the changes in specified environmental
indicator parameters in defined ecosystems, monitored with
Tourism Recreation Research VoJ..25, No. 1, 2000
Tourism in the Most Fragile Environments: R. Buckley
sufficient precision, power and replication and adequate
control sites, in response to known activities, at known times
of year, by known numbers of tourists with known
equipment and known skills and education, under known
management regimes (Buckley 1994~1999b).
Thirdly, even for those impacts which have been
measured repeatedly by experimental means, such as those
of trampling on vegetation, it requires a very large number
of studies before differences in the stress-response and
recovery relationships can be compared between
ecosystems. Indeed, vegetation trampling is probably the
only impact of tourism where this has been attempted, other
than the grossest measures such as water quality impacts
from large-scale sewage discharge. There are individual
studies which have examined relatively subtle impacts
using relatively sophisticated techniques. For example,
remote telemetry has been used to monitor heart rate of
some of the larger mammals of North American national
parks, to examine the energetic consequences of human
visual disturbance. Studies of this sophistication, however,
are very infrequent.
Fourthly, even where individual impacts are relatively
well quantified, the cumulative effects of different types of
tourism activity, on different components of the
environment, repeated or continued over an extended
period of time, are particularly difficult to assess. For some
animal species, a single initial disturbance produces a large
impact, but habituation reduces the impacts of subsequent
disturbances. For others, a single disturbance may produce
only a shortlived impact, but cumulative repeated
disturbances may affect behaviour so much that the
individual moves permanently away, is unable to reproduce
successfully, or dies.
Regrettably, current research funding mechanisms do
not support detailed research on the impacts of tourism.
Science funding agencies considered it too applied; tourism
funding agencies think it too expensive and don't recognize
its significance; national parks management agencies
recognize its significance but have inadequate budgets to
support it; and the tourism industry itself has little interest
in quantifying its own impacts.
Hence, critical information on the environmental
impacts of different tourist activities at various scales and
intensities, in different ecosystems, is largely lacking.
Information on the effectiveness of different management
tools in reducing the impacts of tourism is hence largely
qualitative, derived principally from the experience of park
rangers and managers, which may not always be adequate
when visitor numbers increase beyond the range of their
prior experience.
35
Tourism in the Most Fragile Environments: R. Buckley
In addition to information on the effectiveness of
different management tools in different circumstances, land
managers in fragile environments that are used for nature
tourism therefore need a suite of management indicators
to enable them to assess what tools to use at different times.
Management indicators need to cover both the tourism
activity, for example, through monitoring the number of
visitors, their activities and equipment, and the times and
places involved; and also the environmental response,
including both the selection of the most relevant parameters,
adequate sampling and monitoring design, and the
establishment of a feedback link from environmental
indicators to management actions, including management
of visitors as well as the natural environment.
Management tools and indicators
Management measures fall into two main categories:
those applied to the natural environment, and those applied
to visitors. The former include both measures to harden
the environment against further impact, through
engineering measures such as road surfacing, track
construction, duckboarding, bridges, platforms, lookouts,
toilets, shelters, etc; and measures to restore the
environment after past damage, e.g. through soil
conservation works, revegetation, eradication of weeds and
feral animals, and reintroduction of wildlife.
Management measures applied to visitors fall into
three principal categories: regulations, education, and
economic incentives. Regulations can apply constraints to
tourist activity through, for example, development approval
processes; planning controls and zoning, restrictions on
activities, equipment, seasons, group size, etc; and a variety
of permitting processes. Educational measures can include
interpretive centres, signage, videos, leaflets, training
courses, and guides, either publicly funded rangers or
private tour guides. Economic measures, which are
currently used principally to raise revenue rather than to
influence visitor behaviour, include a wide range of
entrance fees, user charges, licence fees, etc.
Many different frameworks have evolved for
managing tourism in national parks and similar areas.
Perhaps the best known of these is the so-called ROS/LAC
approach ~ Recreational Opportunity Spectra and Limits
of Acceptable Change. The basis for this approach is that
land managers should provide opportunities for different
types of recreation in different areas, that is essentially a
zoning approach; and that they should restrict the intensity
of these activities once impacts exceed predefined
thresholds; i.e. essentially a quota approach. Hence a park
36
would typically be divided into small areas which are set
aside for high-use high-impact activities, and much larger
areas set aside for low-use low-impact activities.
ROS/LAC approaches, originally proposed by
Stankey et al. (1985), have now been tried and adopted
extensively in many countries, especially the USA, Canada
and Australia (McCool and Cole 1997; Worboys 1998). In
its original and standard form, the ROS/LAC framework
spans the entire range of activities from inte!1Sive to sparse,
and the entire range of environments from heavily
developed to remote and pristine. Under this system, most
of the more remote and fragile wilderness areas would
generally fall into a single category. The ROS/LAC
conceptual approach, however, can be applied at any level
of refinement, with classes subdivided appropriately.
Many other frameworks and variations have been
proposed, each with its own acronym and advocates, and
each incorporating or focusing on different elements from
the options outlined above (Cole et al. 1987; Harroun and
Boo 1996; Lindberg et al. 1997;Worboys 1998; Buckley 1986;
1999b, 1999c). Taken together, they may be thought of as a
toolkit, a set of monitorir.tg techniques and management
approaches which can be used in various combinations in
different circumstances. As with any form of active
management, management indicators are as important as
management tools. Knowledge of tourist numbers and
activities, and condition of and change in the natural
environment, are needed both to select management
measures and to assess their performance.
Management Funding
As tourism in protected areas and other fragile
environments continues to increase, management budgets
become increasingly thinly stretched. Larger and larger
amounts are needed for routine tourist infrastructure such
as tracks and toilets, and less and less is available for basic
conservation management. Protected areas now underpin
an enormous industry (Driml and Common 1995; Eagles
1995,. Ward 1999). The level of support provided by
governments, however, is typically very small in
comparison to that provided for other industry sectors.
Funding for tourism portfolios is generally devoted almost
entirely to marketing; and funding to manage protected
areas is derived from environment portfolios, which are
almost always underfunded.
Many protected area managers, therefore, are keen to
levy individual visitors and commercial tour operators to
cover the management costs associated with opening
Tourism Recreation Research Vol. 25, No. 1, 2000

protected areas for recreation and commercial tourism.
There is, however, a well-known paradox associated with
this practice. If local park managers keep the funds they
raise, then there is a strong pressure to operate the park as
a tourist attraction rather than as a conservation reserve.
In some areas this has led reserve managers to grant
concessions for tourist hotels and even golf courses inside
conservation reserves. This pressure is exacerbated if
governments reduce central funding in proportion to funds
raised from tourism. There is also an issue of social equity:
if a country's citizens have already contributed to public
costs through the taxation system, why should they pay
again to use the parks; particularly if government
expenditure on other industry sectors and infrastructure is
proportionately far greater than that allocated for parks and
environment portfolios? In addition, fees may discriminate
against people with lower ability to pay, though this can be
addressed through a tiered schedule of fees, as noted below.
On the other hand, if governments impose park
entrance fees but require the funds to be contributed to
central revenue, this may remove the incentive for
overcommercialization, but it imposes an additional staff
and administrative cost on local park managers, without
corresponding recompense.
The optimum approach would hence appear to be a
hybrid funding model, where funds for conservation
management and the provision for basic recreational
facilities are provided centrally through the government
budget process, and funds required for marginal
expenditure associated with increasing levels of tourism
may be raised from tourists and tour operators, and retained
locally for immediate management expenditure. Different
fees are generally needed to allow local residents continued
access, for example, through season passes, with once-off
visitors paying a higher premium. Even this approach will
be inequitable to the tourist industry, if governments
provide proportionally larger subsidies to other industry
sectors. The industry can hardly complain, however, as
long as it continues to use its entire portfolio funding for
marketing, with little or no funds allocated to support
environmental'management of the resources on which it
depends.
Tourism as a Conservation Tool
Tourism is a large industry sector with environmental
impacts which, though less than most of the primary and
manufacturing industries, are still substantial because of
its scale. In addition, because of the growth of the NEAT
sector, tourism impacts are particularly significant for:
Tourism Recreation Research Vol. 25, No.1, 2000
Tourism in the Most Fragile Environments: R. Buckley
protected areas and public lands; remote, undisturbed and
wilderness areas; and fragile environments of high
conservation value. Currently, tourism is simply one
component of an industrialised human society which is
placing an ever larger and deeper ecological footprint on
the planet. From an environmental perspective, nature
tourism is of particular concern because in most developed
nations, it is the only significant land use permitted inside
conservation reserves and other protected areas, and in
many of these areas it is now posing a significant threat to
conservation values (Worboys 1998).
It is possible, however, that tourism could make a net
positive contribution to global conservation of the nature
environment, but only if relatively stringent conditions are
met. There are various possible mechanisms (Buckley
19q9d). Those relevant to fragile environments include the
following.
Tourism could contribute money to the conservation
estate directly, e.g. through entrance fees, permit and licence
fees, operator levies, etc. This would only provide a net
positive contribution to conservation if two conditions are
met. First, the total funds contributed would need to be
significantly greater than the associated management and
administration costs. Management costs include all the
capital, infrastructure and operating costs associated with
managing land and facilities for tourism, and maintaining
the condition of the natural environment under tourist
pressure. Administration costs refers to the costs of
collecting and distributing the funds concerned. Secondly,
this surplus would have to be actually used for enhancing
the conservation estate, either by restoration and
rehabilitation of areas subject to past impacts, or through
the purchase of additional land for conservation.
Tourism could also make an indirect, but potentially
even larger. economic contribution to conservation if the
industry were to lobby governments to increase funding
for the purchase and management of land for protected
areas. Clearly this would be to the long-term advantage of
the tourism industry; yet it does not seem to be happening.
The tourism industry lobbies for government funds to be
spent on tourism marketing, and it lobbies for free access
to protected areas and for tourism facilities and
infrastructure funded from the environment portfolio; but
it does not lobby for dedication of new parks or increases
in the environment portfolio budget.
Of course, existing tour operators which already have
permits for national parks stand to profit if access for other
operators is restricted. If permits are reallocated
periodically by a bidding or lottery process, however, then
37
Tourism in the Most Fragile Environments: R. Buckley
established operators have no economic advantage over
newcomers.
It is possible, of course, that even if tour operators and
tourism industry associations do not lobby for increased
government funding for conservation, that individual
tourists may do so; and it may be argued that if this happens,
the tourism industry may have contributed indirectly by
providing its clients with the opportunity to experience
natural environments and hence to value them more highly.
This is a very tenuous argument, however. It appears that
many individuals who arready have a strong interest in the
natural environment and its conservation, may use
commercial tour operators to enable them to visit new areas
- and indeed, this is one of the factors driving the growth
in the NEAT sector. There are also specialist tour companies
and guides which do indeed suggest to their clients that
they should lobby for particular conservation causes.
Currently, however, these are very small effects relative to
the overall growth of nature tourism and its impacts in
fragile environments.
The most promising mechanism for tourism to
contribute to conservation is through influencing land use
allocation. In both developed and developing nations, there
are large areas of natural environments which could make
a valuable contribution to both tourism and conservation,
but which are not currently protected. In the developed
nations these include large areas of public lands managed
by forestry and pastoral agencies, and smaller areas of
private laQd. In cases examined to date, tourism routinely
provides a far higher economic return, with far lower
environmental impacts, than primary extractive activities
such as logging, woodchipping and cattle grazing (Driml
and Common 1995; Menkhaus and Lober 1996; Anon 1998;
Ward 1999).
If public forests, for example, are reallocated from
commercial logging to commercial nature tourism, then
tourism will arguably have made a significant confribution
to the conservation of fragile environments. Similarly, in
developing nations, if tourism provides local employment
and economic opportunities which lead residents,
traditional owners and other land holders to conserve plants
and animals for nature tourism rather than killing
endangered wildlife or selling timber to international
logging interest, then tourism could also make a
contribution to conservation of fragile environments in these
countries. In practice, it appears that this approach is rarely
successful unless local communities have been involved in
planning the tourism enterprise from the f'arliest stages
(Child 1996; King and Stewart 1996; Bawa Village 1997; Yu
et al. 1997).
38
Tourism Growth and Land Access
Perhaps more than any other part of the tourism
industry, the continued growth in the NEAT sector is limited
by access to suitable land. Sites for urban ·tourism
destinations may become inq;easingly expensive, but if the
demand is sufficient, land can also be bought. Theme parks,
casinos and conference centres need little space. Beaches,
mountains, lakes and rivers, however, are in fixed supply,
and in many parts of the world have already been crowded
out by large-scale tourism development. For tourists who
specifically want to experience remote or uncrowded areas,
or to see rare or unusual scenery or wildlife, and for tour
operators who want to capitalise on those markets, access
to the natural environments concerned is also becoming a
limiting factor on a global scale.
The crunch is already being felt in many developed
nations, with quotas and stringent management
requirements applied to tourism activities in many of the
more popular national parks and wilderness areas. As
demand continues to grow, such restrictions will surely
become more widespread and more stringent. Some
protected area managers may respond to this excess of
demand over supply by imposing high entrance fees. For
public lands in developed countries, however, social equity
considerations are likely to prevent park managers from
providing access solely to the more privileged and affluent.
Instead, they will probably continue to rely on current quota
mechanisms such as waiting lists and lotteries.
As long as demand exceeds supply, however, this will
create a commercial opportunity for private land holders
to establish exclusive nature tourism preserves where they
can cho.rge high fees for those who can afford them and
who do not wish to wait for access to protected areas, or to
submit to the n!strictions on their activities once they arrive.
This alone, however, is unlikely to satisfy the growing public
demand for nature tourism from all sectors of the
community.
The logical approach, therefore, is to allocate other
public lands from production forestry and agriculture to
nature tourism. Of course, there is likely to be considerable
political opposition to this approach from private interests
who currently profit from logging or grazing in the lands
concerned. In the time it takes for the tourism industry to
become a sufficiently organized, powerful and lobbying
force to overcome these vested interests, con~inued and
indeEd intensified logging and grazing may well have
destroyed much of the tourism and conservation value of
the lands concerned. Hence it is important, for the
continued growth of the NEAT sector, to involve
Tourism Recreation Research Vol. 25, No.1, 2000
 Tourism in the Most Fragile Environments : R. Buckley

stakeholders from other industry sectors and ensure that
they can also profit from a reallocation of land to nature
tourism. Lessons from developing nations apply equally
well in the developed world!
Conclusions
Growth in global tourism is placing increasing
pressure on the world's most fragile environments. To
conserve biodiversity, water quality and other natural
resources in these areas without impeding the economic
growth of nature tourism, three main steps are required:
better monitoring and management of visitors and tourists
in protected areas; improved funding for protected areas
land and visitor management, both from government and
the tourism industry; and allocation of other public and
private land to nature tourism, so as to alleviate press'!Jre
on protected areas.
Ralf Buckley is Professor & Director of the International Centre for
Ecotourism Research at Griffith University,
Australia; Director, Nature and Adventure Tourism
for Australia's Cooperative Research Centre for
Sustainable Tourism, which is the sustainable-
tourism research provider for the World Travel and
Tourism Council; and co-director of the Green
Leaders Initiative on Best-Practice Environmental
Management in Tourism. He has 25 years' academic
and industry experience in ecology and
environmental manageme11t worldwide, and lzas published 6 books and
over 150 journal articles. He has 12 years experience in tourism, both as
a tour guide and a researcher.
e-mail: r.buckley@mailbox.gu.edu.au

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Received January 2, 1999; Accepted June 20, 1999

40 Tourism Recreation Research Vol. 25, No. 1, 2000