Sustainable tourism - Essay Example

Sustainable Tourism Tourism is a major source of revenue for countries with substantial tourist attraction features like beautiful scenery, good sporting sites and all-year-round favourable climate. People normally travel to experience new and different cultures, surrounding, or just to relax. During winter, people from countries in the in the polar region usually visit the tropics to enjoy the warm sunny conditions prevailing in these regions. However, extensive researches in various countries which are tourist destinations reveal that tourism has had both negative and positive effects on the environment and the communities.

Positive impacts According to Honey (1999), tourism is a source of employment for many people who serve in the tourist hotels, tourist travel agencies or serve as tour guides and local traders. This is very important in a country with low agricultural viability and is not a major producer of any valuable mineral or oil. It is also a direct market for locally produced commodities for example artefacts, clothing and foodstuff while tourist hotels form a good market for locally produced agricultural products.

Some of the Tourists are potential investors and this increases the chances of a country getting more foreign investment. Tourism stimulates decentralised development because governments will have to ensure that major tourist destinations within the country are developed. These include infrastructure development and rural electrification. Whenever tourists start visiting a country, the people start to realise the importance and economic potentialities of their available resources for example wildlife, water bodies, coastal regions and culture.

This motivates them to preserve these resources and hence a protection of an environment which could have been exploitative by man in various ways. This results to biodiversity preservation and preservation of the environment’s natural beauty (Prem1995). Negative impacts In some places tourism has negative social impacts to the local communities. For example tourism leads to increased prostitution along the beaches, adoption of unethical dressing styles and increased crimes like drug trafficking and drunkenness.

Though tourism encourages the preservation of the environment, some tourists fail to cooperate on this leading to a degeneration of their destination. They move about the beaches and game parks throwing plastics and other consumer waste products (Swanson 1996). Tourism necessitates the building of tourist hotels and this takes place mostly long the beaches and inside remote game parks. This leads to the destruction and pollution of the coastal and rangeland biodiversity for example through land clearing and improper waste management.

Tourism involves a lot of travelling which requires the burning of bio-fuels. This leads to the release of green house gases like CO2 which contribute to global warming (Andereck 1993) Mitigation measures Measures needed to reduce the potentially negative impacts of tourism include continuous monitoring of tourism impacts and introducing appropriate corrective and preventive measures. These include imposing fines on tourists found throwing plastic materials carelessly in the parks or long the beach.

The government should put in place proper control measures to ensure that future tourist developments are managed appropriately. Most importantly, governments should make responsible tourism as one of its guiding policy in tourism sector .This will ensure that the existing tourism resources remain viable and hence maintain their profitability as well as protecting the environment (World Tourism Organization 2001). References Andereck Kathleen (1993). "The impacts of tourism on natural resources” Parks & Recreation. Online. http://findarticles.

com/p/articles/mi_m1145/is_n6_v28/ai_13952796/.Viewed: 8th march, 2011. Honey Martha. (1999). Ecotourism and Sustainable Development: Who Owns Paradise? Washington, DC, USA. Island Press. Prem Benimadhu.(1995). Adding value: The role of the human resource function. Online. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1145/is_n6_v28/ai_13952796/pg_2/. Viewed: 8th march, 2011. Swanson Timothy. (1996). The economics of environmental degradation. Cheltenham, UK.Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. World Tourism Organization. (2001). Sustainable Development of Tourism: A Compilation of Good Practices.

Madrid, Spain. World Tourism Organization,