gender differential paper IJCRB

ijcrb.webs.com
JUNE 2011
INTERDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY RESEARCH IN BUSINESS VOL 3, NO 2
2. The Impacts between Sustainable Development & Tourism Industry
Tourism industry is arguably the biggest industry in the world in terms of employment and revenue.
As the main source of foreign capital in many developing and transition countries where have rapid
growth on tourism related activities, tourism has been considered as an important economic factor
there. A sustainable tourism becomes more and more critical for these areas’ long-term
development.
But there is a contradiction between the sustainability and tourism. On the one hand, sustainable
development is definitely good for tourism. It can stretch the destination’s lifecycle, enhance its
competition. On the other hand, in some sense, developing tourism means exploiting, consuming,
and even polluting resources, some of which are nonrenewable, especially those in the destination.
The direct result of this is destroying the sustainability. That’s two-way relationship between them.
The following will discuss the relationship from environmental, socio-cultural, and economic
aspects according to the latest definition of sustainable development of tourism.
2.1 Environment Issues
Sustainability in environmental aspect of tourism means making optimal use of environmental
resources that constitute a key element in tourism development, maintaining essential ecological
processes and helping to conserve natural heritage and biodiversity (WTO, 2004). For the naturalbased
destinations, the fresh air, clear water, blue sky with sunshine, etc. the beautiful natural
scenery is what attracts tourists. So protecting environment should be one of the tourism’s
obligations, even for their own benefits. Unfortunately, as a matter of fact, the development of
tourism does have some negative impacts on its dependent environment.
Pollution
When we talk about tourism pollution issues, there was a consensus of travelers’ consumption in
transportation, mainly road and air transportation. It is said that the use of road transport by travelers
contributes significantly to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. And air transport, not as much as road,
made more and more GHG emissions, too. The effect of that is the climate change. Temperature
rises, sea level rises, flood, storms and sea surges, all of these will in turn put tourism at risk.
Tourisms in seaside and mountain regions are the two very sensitive areas to climate change. The
global mean sea level rose by between 10cm and 20cm during the twentieth century and current
predictions suggest a rise of 20cm to 100cm, with a mid-estimate of 50cm, during the twenty first
(Jones, 2003). Some of the beautiful beaches and even small islands will be regressing or
disappeared, as a result of that. Tourism destinations then will find themselves without attraction.
Similar thing will happen in mountain regions. Mountain region especially those that attract tourists
by snow or glacier will suffer the shrinking snow cover because of the temperature rises. Using
Tibet of China as an example, according to the surveys performed by a group of 20 scientists from
China and the United States over a 40-month period, “Tibet's glaciers have been receding over the
past four decades due to global warming, …most of the plateau's glaciers will have disappeared
from the face of the Earth by the turn of the next century, … global warming was causing China's
highland glaciers, including those covering Mount Everest, to shrink by an amount equivalent to all
the water in the Yellow River - China's second biggest - every year.” That will not only damage the
tourism industry there, but also destroyed the lives of nearly 300 million people. (YaoTongdong,
2004)
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