the role of tourism in natural resource management in the okavango ...

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In addition to direct environmental impacts, tourism may have indirect
effects and induce further development and associated impacts, which may
be difficult to identify and not amenable to straightforward assessment;
Some tourism impacts will only manifest themselves over the long term,
making the establishment of casualty links more difficult; and
Components of the environment are inter-linked, and so a tourism activity
which impacts on one aspect of the environment may produce an indirect
impact on another.
Additionally, the impacts of tourism development are not necessarily restricted to
destination areas, but will spread over a wider area depending on the strength of the
linkages (economic, social, transport, environmental) between the host area and its
surroundings, making the task of a comprehensive impact assessment even more
problematic as the scale of analysis widens (Briassoulis, 1991).
The difficulties highlighted above are reflected in the limited (both geographically
and in terms of the environmental components considered) nature of the majority of
tourism impact studies in the literature. Pearce (1989) considers a number of other
related factors to be responsible for the fragmented state of tourism impact studies.
These include a lack of resources, defective assessment methodologies, a failure to
appreciate the process of tourism development and the lack of an inter-disciplinary
research ethos (Hunter and Green, 1995). More specifically, some of the more
apparent impacts of tourism on a destination area's natural/environmental resources
are presented in the following sub-sections:
2.11.1 Impacts on the Natural Environment
2.11.1.1 Floral and Faunal Species Composition
The ecological balance of an area, which can take up to thousands of years to
evolve into a mature, self-regulating, stable system, can be disrupted and even
destroyed by a variety of tourism-related activities in a relatively short period of time.
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