Assessment of the main sustainable tourism indicators in the Protected Areas of the Gjirokastra region

Accessibility of protected areas and visitor behaviour: A case study from Iceland

Protected areas for conservation and poverty alleviation: experiences from Madagascar Charlie J. Gardner*, Martin E. Nicoll, Tsibara Mbohoahy, Kirsten L. L. Oleson, Anitry N. Ratsifandrihamanana, Joelisoa Ratsirarson, Lily-Arison Ren e de Roland, Malika Virah-Sawmy, Bienvenue Zafindrasilivonona and Zoe G. Davies WWF Madagascar and Western Indian Ocean Programme Office, BP738, Antananarivo 101, Madagascar; Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology (DICE), School of Anthropology and Conservation, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent CT2 7NR, UK; D epartement de Biologie, Facult e des Sciences, Universit e de Toliara, Toliara 601, BP 185, Toliara, Madagascar; Blue Ventures Conservation, Level 2 Annex, Omnibus Business Centre, 39-41 North Road, N7 9DP London, UK; ESSA-D epartement Eaux et Forets, Universit e d’Antananarivo, BP 175 Antananarivo, Madagascar; and The Peregrine Fund, BP 4113 Antananarivo, Madagascar

In many developing countries, there are protected areas with very strong natural resources and tourism development potential but in a poor conservation condition. Many of these areas are at pre or early stages of tourism development. These protected areas face problems including shortages of financial resources and park staff, and difficulty in enforcing conservation laws. Strict conservation laws have limited local residents’ access to the natural resources and created problems such as increased poaching, habitat destruction and local people-park conflicts. This study adopts a case study approach, choosing two villages in rural Iran that are located near protected areas, one with no tourism and one at the early stage of tourism. Both these villages are experiencing challenges in striving for environmental protection and community development in a remote area of the country. There is a growing body of literature that recognises the importance of local resident attitudes and local people-park relationship roles in achieving both conservation goals and sustainable tourism development in and around protected areas. It is also suggested that incentives from tourism have a pivotal role in positively affecting local resident attitudes to the environment and consequently their behaviour. However, a challenge in the tourism literature is that most of the studies on local resident attitudes to the environment were conducted at a certain stage of development and their results cannot be applied to other stages. Although the literature indicates that tourism revenues improve local resident attitudes towards the environment and conservation, with no study comparing attitudes before and after tourism development, it is unclear whether these positive attitudes are due to tourism benefits or whether the local resident attitudes were positive even before tourism development. It is also widely discussed and hypothesised in the tourism literature that people with positive environmental attitudes are more likely to support environmental conservation activities. Local resident attitudes towards conservation have generally been studied as a single variable in the tourism literature. Importantly the environmental literature suggests that local resident attitudes towards environmental conservation and their attitudes towards protected area management might be different and a distinction has been made in studying these attitudes as separate variables. Consequently, this study aims to investigate the differences between local resident attitudes towards the environment, protected area management (PAM) and tourism at two early stages of tourism development by comparing attitudes in a community that has no prior experience of tourism and a community at an early stage of tourism development. This involved developing six ii hypotheses to assess the association between the three variables within and across a non-tourism setting and a setting with some tourism development in the two case study villages. A survey instrument was designed to measure local residents’ socio-demographic information, attitudes towards the environment, attitudes towards protected area management, and attitudes towards tourism. Information on the cases study villages was also gathered via interviews, observations and secondary data. Analyses of the survey data revealed that, in contrast to the literature, there were no significant differences in attitudes toward the environment between the two settings. Importantly, there were statistically significant differences between attitudes towards protected area management in the two settings. Based on the survey and the other qualitative data collected, it seems that tourism was successful in providing alternative sources of income for local residents and in reducing their dependence on natural resources and resulted in fewer local people-park conflicts and more positive attitudes towards protected area management. However, observation in the village with tourism showed that these positive environmental attitudes did not translate into environmental behaviour, as local residents were engaged in unsustainable environmental activities in the village. For the case study villages, tourism does appear to offer potential to improve both environmental protection and community development, but tourism development needs to proceed carefully and with awareness of the potential for other environmental problems to emerge if it is not well managed. This study has contributed to the tourism body of knowledge as the first study to focus on local resident attitudes at the pre-development stage and compare it with attitudes at the early stages of tourism development. It further made a distinction between attitudes towards the environment and attitudes towards protected area management which had not been previously addressed in tourism studies. Practical suggestions have been made for protected area mangers and tourism planners. Knowing local resident attitudes at the early stages of tourism development should assist in reducing local people-park conflicts, improving environmental conservation, and reducing negative tourism environmental impacts. To ensure tourism contributes to both environmental conservation and community development, there is a need for different management strategies such as education programs, zoning, and law enforcement in and around protected areas. To achieve these goals, all key stakeholders such as government bodies and local communities must be included in protected area planning and tourism development.

trialspecies,therelativemeritsofdifferentapproachesto ensure the long-term persistence of those species remain highly contentious. Most would agree, however, that both establishing protected areas and exercising some form of restraint on extraction of forest resources are among the most effective of all viable conservation measures. Deforestation, wildfires, logging, and hunting are among the leading drivers of species losses in tropical forests, and de facto or de jure protection from these threats can be conferred by either effective enforcement of regulations or physical remoteness. Attempts to assess conservation success of protected areasatlargescaleshaverestedprimarilyonconventional use of remote sensing to quantify spatial or temporal differences in rates of change in land cover due to deforestation and wildfires, rather than on empirical demographic or community-level metrics (Gaston et al. 2008). Q2 However, the former approaches fail to detect most types of subcanopy anthropogenic disturbances that also result, directly or indirectly, in species losses (Peres et al. 2006). Moreover, the effects of habitat loss and degradation on population extirpations and declines are nonlinear, so vegetation cover alone is rarely a robust proxy for the viability of terrestrial biotas. Remotesensing data show vast tracts of apparently intact tropical forests, but in reality levels of hunting and other forms of extraction in these areas are often unsustainable (Peres & Lake 2003). Fundamental questions yet to be answered include whether ostensibly intact protected areas retain full complements of forest species and how the extent of cryptic patterns of disturbance is related to human population density in both protected and unprotected areas. I considered the global to regional emergence of sustainable-use reserves, emphasizing the world’s largest tropical forest region, Amazonia. Sustainable-use reserves often have intermediate levels of disturbance, so I examined the degree of use of natural resources by resident communities and used human population density as a proxy for level of extraction. In both protected and unprotected areas, I also estimated responses of game vertebrate assemblages to hunting on the basis of the relative biomassextractedfromasubsetoftheforestfauna.Iused analysesofcovariance(ANCOVA)toexaminetheassociationbetweenhumandensityandgamebiomassharvested across different reserve categories. Finally, I considered the long-term capacity of sustainable-use forest reserves to maintain populations of all resident species.

Understanding the activities and preferences of visitors is crucial for managing protected areas and planning conservation strategies. Conservation culturomics promotes the use of user-generated online content in conservation science. Geotagged social media content is a unique source of in situ information on human presence and activities in nature. Photographs posted on social media platforms are a promising source of information, but analyzing large volumes of photographs manually remains laborious. We examined the application of state-of-the-art computer-vision methods to studying human-nature interactions. We used semantic clustering, scene classification, and object detection to automatically analyze photographs taken in Finnish national parks by domestic and international visitors. Our results showed that human-nature interactions can be extracted from user-generated photographs with computer vision. The different methods complemented each other by revealing broad visual themes related to level of the data set, landscape photogeneity, and human activities. Geotagged photographs revealed distinct regional profiles for national parks (e.g., preferences in landscapes and activities), which are potentially useful in park management. Photographic content differed between domestic and international visitors, which indicates differences in activities and preferences. Information extracted automatically from photographs can help identify preferences among diverse visitor groups, which can be used to create profiles of national parks for conservation marketing and to support conservation strategies that rely on public acceptance. The application of computer-vision methods to automatic content analysis of photographs should be explored further in conservation culturomics, particularly in combination with rich metadata available on social media platforms.

Strengthening research efforts to understand the combined impacts of conservation and livelihoods in protected areas (PAs) will increase the collective contribution that PAs can make towards meeting global goals for sustainable development in the next decade. As an example of such efforts, in 2014 the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UN Environment) jointly initiated the “Sustainable Management of Protected Areas in East Africa” project. This paper provides a brief overview of the project’s research background, goals and research tasks. The study is based on a look at the PA management system in East Africa and a review of the literature on the impact of PAs in the region. Results show that East African nations have expanded the coverage of PAs and established a complex set of PA management systems over the past century. The mandate for PAs in East African nations has changed recently from protecting biodiversity to alleviating poverty and supporting livelihoods. However, a combination of human activities and ecological processes inside and outside of PAs may not only impact biodiversity and ecosystem function over the long term, but also pose a threat to the capacity of PAs to maintain livelihoods and alleviate poverty in the local communities around them. The state of existing research in the field suggests there is an enormous need for additional research, the purpose of which is to help PA managers and policy-makers in East Africa understand how to achieve win-win outcomes for both ecosystems and human well-being. Against this background, the CAS-KWS-UN Environment joint research project aims to understand the dynamic interactions between ecosystems and human well-being around PAs in East Africa and identify good practices for PA management to reconcile conservation targets with the livelihood demands of local communities. It is intended that this research be shared with interested parties throughout the developing world. Significant progress has been made in the implementation of the project, in terms of data collection, exchanges of researchers, and the completion of case studies. In the coming year, success stories and examples of failures of PA management in the region will be systematically summarized and shared among scientists, managers and decision makers worldwide. Given its blueprint for building a “Beautiful China”, China can both supplement and benefit from East African knowledge and experience of PA management. This joint research effort promotes Sino-African cooperation on PA research and management.

Protected areas (PAs) governance is increasingly seen as a critical determinant for PA management effectiveness. This paper aims to explore the actors involved in PA governance and management and their roles, and the factors influencing the PA management success as perceived by local communities in Manyara region, Tanzania. This study further explores the community perceptions of PAs governance using good governance principles including legitimacy and voice, accountability, performance, and fairness and rights. A mixed methods approach was used in this research which comprised structured household interviews, key informant interviews and document review. Respondents ranked local community involvement (12.6%) and environmental education and awareness (13.8%) as the top most important or relevant factors for PA management success in the region. Overall perceptions of respondents indicate that legitimacy and voice (83%), fairness and rights (75%) and performance (68%) were the good principles of PA governance while transparency was the weak governance criteria which may undermine effective community participation in PAs management in the region. This study suggests the need for full involvement and coordination of many stakeholders including the local communities, integration of multilateral governance principles and improving environmental education and awareness for effective governance and management of PAs in the region.

The relation between tourism and rural development has been strengthened by planning frameworks such as rural development (the LEADER programmes) and by the management of protected natural areas. This relation also contributes to the concept of the multifunctionality of agricultural land. However, in the management of protected areas in Spain, the role of tourism and the public use of areas of maximum protection are often prioritised to the detriment of the agrarian societies with a permanent presence in these surroundings. In this paper, we analyse the impact of environmental planning and rural development on the characterisation of private tourist services in the Sierra de las Nieves natural park (near Málaga, Spain), using statistical sources, surveys and interviews with stakeholders. The results obtained show that the geographic distribution of private facilities is largely unrelated to public considerations. We view this outcome as a consequence of the disjunction between the agrarian traditions of local society and the new measures adopted to promote tourist activities.

Area-based conservation is essential to safeguard nature’s diversity. In view of expanding human land use, increasing climate change and unmet conservation targets, area-based conservation requires efficiency and effectiveness more than ever. In this review, I identify and relate pressing challenges to promising opportunities for effective and efficient protected area governance and management, to enhance research, decision-making and capacity building in area-based conservation under uncertain future developments. I reveal that protected area management is particularly challenged by human land use, climate change, invasive species, and social, political and economic limitations. Protected area management often lacks the continuous availability of data on current states and trends of nature and threats. Biocultural conservation, climate-smart management and biosecurity approaches help to overcome challenges induced by human needs, climate change and invasive species, respectively. Economic valuation and shifts in funding priorities can boost protected area effectiveness and efficiency. In-situ monitoring techniques, remote sensing and open data infrastructures can fill data and information gaps for protected area planning and management. Moreover, adaptive management is an auspicious concept in the framework of systematic conservation planning to ensure the enduring effectiveness of protected areas despite unpredictable future developments. Post-2020 international biodiversity and sustainable development goals could be met earlier if protected areas were more effective. I consequently conclude with the need for a global information system that is to support area-based conservation by synthesizing challenges and opportunities for protected area management effectiveness and efficiency at the local to global level.

In the management of protected nature areas, arguments are being raised for increasingly integrated approaches. Despite an explicit ambition from the responsible managing governmental agencies, Swedish Environmental Protection Agency and Swedish National Heritage Board, attempts to initiate and increase the degree of integrated nature and cultural heritage conservation management in the Swedish mountains are failing. The delivery of environmental policy through the Swedish National Environmental Objective called Magnificent Mountains is dependent on increased collaboration between the state and local stakeholders. This study, using a group model building approach, maps out the system’s dynamic interactions between nature perceptions, values and the objectives of managing agencies and local stakeholders. It is identified that the dominance of a wilderness discourse influences both the objectives and management of the protected areas. This wilderness discourse functions as a barrier against including cultural heritage conservation aspects and local stakeholders in management, as wilderness-influenced objectives are defining protected areas as environments “untouched” by humans. A wilderness objective reduces the need for local knowledge and participation in environmental management. In reality, protected areas depend, to varying degrees, on the continuation of traditional land-use practices.

Protected areas are widely recognized as a cornerstone of biodiversity and natural resources management and sustainable development. Protected areas are a vital part of securing human prosperity and quality of life. In China, the legal framework for protected area management is scattered around various regulations. In order to better manage protected areas in China, the Chinese government has issued and revised some laws, regulations and policies on protected areas conservation and management. However, protected areas management is still facing some challenges. There is little legal literature on this issue and this paper tries to fill this gap. Firstly, it will briefly introduce the most relevant laws, regulations and policy on protected areas management. Secondly, it will analyze the recent challenges of protected areas management. Thirdly, some possible suggestions on how to better solve the recent challenges on protected areas management in China will be proposed. These suggestions include improving the management system, improving the relevant legislation, promoting public participation and establishing a diversified funding guarantee system.

Urban destinations, housing over half the world’s population, are overlooked in sustainable tourism research. Effective management requires selecting sustainable indicators, which are crucial for assessing economic, social, environmental, and governance aspects. However, systematic sustainability appraisal in tourism is still nascent, with previous studies lacking tourist perspectives. This study explores how tourists perceive sustainable tourism indicators in the context of a city destination. The study uses a quantitative approach with an online questionnaire featuring 53 sustainable tourism indicators, surveyed among 305 tourists in Da Lat, a well-known tourism city in the Central Highlands, Vietnam. Descriptive statistics based on mean analyses show that institutional sustainability indicators received the highest score, while environmental indicators were reported with the lowest score in the tourists’ view. The exploratory factor analysis of the importance given to sustainability indicators identified seven factors: 1) Institutional sustainability, 2) Socio-cultural sustainability, 3) Environmental sustainability, 4) Negative environmental impacts, 5) Urban Identity, 6) Sustainable labor in tourism, and 7) Negative socio-cultural impacts. The sustainable tourism development in Da Lat needs to consider the city’s internal issues concerning the planning and management of urban identity. The results demonstrate tourist awareness of sustainability issues and that, in the long run, this awareness might lead to changes in tourist preferences. Tourists see themselves as contributors, helping to enrich the city instead of contributing to overusing available resources. This research shows a more multidimensional sustainable tourism than the classic concept definition from tourists’ perspectives. The findings also highlight sustainability dimensions enhancing tourist experiences.

Comparing established visitor monitoring approaches with triggered trail camera images and machine learning based computer vision

Ecotourism is expected, by the tourism industry and academics, to grow rapidly over the next 20 years. Much has been written about ecotourism, often with missionary zeal, but there is little consensus about its definition. It is argued here that conservationists and protected area managers should adopt a definition of ecotourism which contributes to the maintenance of biodiversity and an appropriate definition is suggested. Ecotourism is not merely an alternative to mass tourism, nor is it the only alternative. The literature on nature tourism and the environmental impacts of the industry dates back to the late 1970s. Tourism is now the world's largest industry and it has an increasing impact on protected areas. Our understanding of these mechanisms, their ecological impacts and our capacity to manage tourism in protected areas lags behind the growth of tourism to protected areas. A rapid growth in nature tourism and tourism to protected areas has coincided with a shift in protected area management strategies towards integrated development. Tourism is one means available to protected area managers seeking to increase the economic value of a protected area and to offer sustainable opportunities for economic development to local people. This paper argues that potentially conflicting commercial, protected area and development interests all contribute to the emergence of ecotourism and have been doing so for many years. Ecotourism needs to be tightly defined if it is to benefit conservation. Protected area managers should consider how they can take control of nature tourism to the parks they manage and convert it into ecotourism for the benefit of conservation and the livelihoods of local people.

Tourism in protected areas can accelerate development opportunities by providing various direct and indirect ecological, socio-economic and cultural benefits, particularly in developing countries (Dudley, 2008; Newsome & Hassell, 2014; Tosun, 2000; WWF [World Wide Fund For Nature], 2014). However, developing countries, and their protected areas, are often characterised by poor governance systems that impede the development of these locations as tourism destinations and therefore affect those (poor) people living in and around these areas (Eklund, Arponen, Visconti, & Cabeza, 2011; Parnini, 2006). Therefore, policy or institutional arrangements are required which promote better governance systems and enable local people to obtain socio-economic and ecological benefits from tourism activities (Figgis & Bushell, 2007). Consequently, a paradigm shift is occurring within protected area planning and management with a transition from traditional top-down to participatory bottom-up approaches to ensure the participation of local stakeholders in decision-making, planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation, and ultimately benefit-sharing (Eagles, McCool, & Haynes, 2002; Niedzialkowski, Paavola, & Jedrzejewska, 2012). As such, these institutional arrangements can promote better governance systems for local communities to improve their living standards as well as facilitating effective protected area management planning systems (Dearden, Bennett, & Johnston, 2005). ‘Adaptive co-management’ (ACM) is a dynamic process whereby institutional arrangements and ecological knowledge are continually tested and revised through a process of ‘learning-by-doing’ (Armitage, Berkes, & Doubleday, 2007b). ACM has been suggested as a more inclusive alternate approach to governance which can better facilitate the management and protection of natural resources (Armitage, Berkes, Dale, Kocho-Schellenberg, & Patton, 2011; Plummer & Fitzgibbon, 2004a). ACM has also been advocated due to the fact that it can provide a means to empower local stakeholders and enhance collaboration with other stakeholder groups. This is achieved through more flexible systems that encompass complex cross-scale linkages (Olsson, Folke, & Berkes, 2004; Wood, Butler, Sheaves, & Wani, 2013). ACM has several attributes or principles. Social learning is one of the key principles and is based on the creation of cooperative and collaborative frameworks that can facilitate iterative learning amongst diverse groups of stakeholders (Ruitenbeek & Cartier, 2001; Schusler, Decker, & Pfeffer, 2003). Social learning is particularly relevant for tourism development in protected areas as tourism is multiple stakeholder activity requiring collaboration (Haddock-Fraser & Hampton, 2010; McCool, 2009). Both ACM and social learning have only recently been explored in tourism although the concepts have yet to be linked to tourism destination governance generally (Chen, Ku, & Chen, 2016; Fennell, Plummer, & Marschke, 2008; Lai, Hsu, & Wearing, 2016; Pennington-Gray, Schroeder, & Gale, 2014) or protected area governance specifically (Lai et al., 2016; Plummer & Fennell, 2009). Addressing the identified research gaps, the overarching aim of this qualitative study is to investigate the impacts of the ACM approach on tourism destination governance in the context of two protected areas of Bangladesh; Lawachara National Park and Sundarbans East Wildlife Sanctuary. This research follows the style of three interconnected manuscripts. Manuscript one presents a review and synthesis of the ACM literature and in doing so identifies four inter-connected principles of the ACM approach: communication and collaboration; social learning; shared rights, responsibility and decision-making; and building adaptive capacity and resilience. A conceptual framework of tourism destination governance that incorporates ACM principles, process, variables and outcomes is developed. Manuscript two aims to empirically investigate the extent to which an ACM approach was able to enhance the achievement of key governance principles such as participation, social learning, accountability, transparency, power, and rule of law. Stakeholder interviews showed that the ACM approach provided a congenial environment that facilitates iterative learning amongst stakeholders, and for some, resulted in attitude and behaviour change towards protected area conservation. Manuscript three is an exploratory study that sought to analyse how social learning is embedded in the governance of a protected area tourism destination. The empirical findings show that social learning allows for diverse stakeholder groups to interact together to create new knowledge, develop awareness and empower local communities. The findings reinforce the importance of social learning for tourism destination governance. The overall theoretical and practical implications of this research are the application of ACM as an approach that can enhance tourism destination governance. Enhanced governance systems are crucial for contributing to sustainable tourism development objectives, as well as protected area conservation and management.