Abstract
Achieving equitable and sustainable ecotourism requires a wide range of multidisciplinary and cross-scale information, particularly given the growing scale of ecotourism operations and continuing governance and climate challenges. Ecosystems in Mexico’s Gulf of California and Baja California Peninsula support a thriving ecotourism industry that has quickly expanded over the last few decades, potentially outpacing research into current performance and future sustainable development opportunities. We develop and apply a formal literature review approach to characterize academic marine ecotourism literature, highlight key insights and identify research strengths and gaps, and thus analyse almost 50 publications for the region from 1994 to 2014. There has been a significant increase in the number of various types of publications; most (68%) focus on ecological themes, 25% on economics, and 7% on social aspects of human wellbeing. There are also trends towards research on specific species (e.g. mammals, fish and sharks) and in specific areas. A common theme in publication conclusions is the need for collaboration from all stakeholder groups. We discuss these findings, and address potential limitations of our method, with a view to informing sound policies to ensure that ecotourism can provide equitable benefits to local communities while incentivizing sustainable practices and nature conservation.
Highlights
Ecosystems in Mexico’s Gulf of California and Baja California Peninsula support a thriving ecotourism industry that has quickly expanded over the last few decades, potentially outpacing research into current performance and future sustainable development opportunities
We develop and apply a formal literature review approach to characterize academic marine ecotourism literature, highlight key insights and identify research strengths and gaps, and analyse almost 50 publications for the region from 1994 to 2014
Address potential limitations of our method, with a view to informing sound policies to ensure that ecotourism can provide equitable benefits to local communities while incentivizing sustainable practices and nature conservation
Summary
Ecotourism can be defined as any recreational activity that explicitly involves the viewing and/or extraction of other living beings in the wild that incorporates some form of environmental education, has low environmental impacts, is intended to be sustainable and in some cases supports local conservation efforts. With the growth in scale of local ecotourism industries, there are efforts to consider negative impacts of ecotourism on marine species and ecosystems This can include clear harm, for example by novice divers breaking coral reefs (Rouphael and Hanafy 2007, Zakai and Chadwick-Furman 2002) or tour vessel collisions with whales and whale sharks (Carrillo and Fritter 2010, Neilson et al 2012), and more subtle, yet potentially significant impacts such as behavioural changes in response to ecotourism operations that may decrease individual fitness or risk aggressive encounters with humans (Hammerschlag et al 2012, Neumann and Orams 2006, Ziegler et al 2012). There are many examples of local improvements and increased awareness of conservation among ecotourists (Hausmann et al 2017, Mieras et al 2017), but long-term and large-scale outcomes remain unclear (Das 2011, Das and Chatterjee 2015)
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