University of Aarhus ECOTOURISM AS A WAY TO PROTECT ...

Ecotourism as a sustainable way to protect nature
empowerment. Communities will perhaps try to preserve their traditional culture
because of outside visitor’s interest. Traditional culture demonstration is one of
several income sources, tied to the local community in ecotourism (Sven, 2000).
It is one of several reasons that tourists plan to travelling to protected areas
(Joseph, 1997).
The sustainability of ecotourism is very dependent on tourism
management strategies. The “carrying capacity” concept may be very useful and
should be implemented in the tourism management strategy. It is really needed
to define the limit levels that the whole ecosystems can tolerate. In order to do
that, we need to focus our attention on the whole ecotourism system, including
local capacity building, susceptibility of the natural ecosystem, sensitivity of the
local culture, etc. But it is very difficult to define different kinds of tourism.
Therefore, the “carrying capacity” needs to be very flexible and adaptable to
different tourism situations. Weaver (2001) has also agreed with our ideas and
emphasised that the carrying capacity could not be fixed.
Carrying capacity alone may not be enough to ensure success in the
control of ecotourism impacts. The flexible and dependable actions sometimes
succeed ant other times they do not. It depends very much on the whole capacity
building and also on the individual participant. Every participant has their own
skill to carry out ecotourism activities. Some can do well and some cannot. The
emergent local guides at The Galapagos Islands could not control well the
visitors because of lacking education (Honey, 1999). This evidence indicates
that how importance of capacity building is. If capacity building is ignored,
long-term negative impacts will be accumulated and lead to expose to the
ecotourism environment later. This is called “accumulated impacts” from
ecotourism.
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