Tourism and environment – two areas that are often related but don’t always work together in harmony.
 
South Africa’s Tourism Sector Strategy, currently awaiting public comment until July 31, deals with this and the subsequent negative impact tourism can have on the environment. The strategy says that the tourism sector has to be “actively” involved in conserving and protecting South Africa’s natural environment, which is one of the country’s greatest tourism resources. It says visitors can be encouraged to participate in the protection and conservation of South Africa’s natural environment and to “enjoy a responsible travel experience”.
 
While there’s little doubt responsible tourists can have a positive impact on their travel destination, it is inevitable that tourism will have some negative impact on the environment.
 
Private sector ecotourism ventures are thought to provide an alternative to government’s sometimes lack of capacity to manage and enforce environmental protection initiatives.
 
Ecotourism is not just a buzzword bandied about by the tourism sector to justify its existence. While there are of course some companies that claim to have strong environmental management policies in place but do so purely from a marketing perspective, were it not for the efforts of others, some of the world’s most precious wildernesses would be destroyed.
 
These tourism companies, like Great Plains Conservation, use a clever combination of community, commercial and conservation principles to protect some of the world’s most threatened habitats.
 
Sustainable tourism guru, Kevin Leo Smith, says both regulation and public perceptions will drive the industry to ever-higher standards. But these calls to save water and support the community, for example, are often just marketing platitudes.
 
“These mostly sound nice but achieve little and are really difficult to prove or disprove.”
 
The sector outlines as part of its action plan the need to develop and implement a programme to set standards, encourage adherence to standards, and measure attainment of standards in environmentally responsible tourism. It calls for indicators to be developed within the field of environmentally responsible and for these to be reported on these indicators.
 
Leo Smith says any new regulations will handle this kind of issue and hopefully also deal with enforcement. “I have been to many safari lodges and camps where the company espouses their great credentials and seen fat traps overflowing with slime or no fat traps at all and fuel installations that have no accidental spill mitigation measures, etc. Many claim to be using solar panels to reduce their electricity footprint without having any understanding of the environmental cost of the panels’ production coupled with the use of batteries on a cradle to grave sense.”
 
Leo Smith says the danger of these well-intentioned plans is that they are often driven by popular clichés not based on facts. “Solar power is not necessarily good but solar water heating is and they are not the same thing.”
 
A strategy development like this, says Leo Smith, needs careful and detailed analysis that is measured against a set of five to 10 guiding principles. “If you don’t have these guiding principles, the strategy always gets lost in the actual details when it should be the other way around.”
 
If you have any views on this issue or how the sector's strategy needs to be changed, simply submit your comments to the National Department of Tourism at strategy@tourism.gov.za well ahead of the July 31 deadline.
 
The countdown is on with only 26 days left to comment - don't miss the opportunity to make your voice heard.