To contribute to achieving local and global sustainability, we propose a novel educational methodology, called field environmental philosophy (FEP), which orients ecotourism practices to reconnect citizens and nature. FEP is based on the systemic approach of the biocultural ethic that values the vital links among the life habits of co-inhabitants (humans and other-than-humans) who share a common habitat. Based on this “3Hs” model (habitats, co-inhabitants, habits), FEP combines tourism with experiential education to reorient biocultural homogenization toward biocultural conservation. FEP’s methodological approach seeks to integrate social, economic, and environmental dimensions of sustainability by generating new links between biological and cultural diversity at different spatial and social scales. Ecotourism has an underutilized potential to link sciences with education and conservation practices at different scales. By incorporating a philosophical foundation, FEP broadens both understanding and practices of environmental education and sustainable tourism. FEP has been developed at the Omora Ethnobotanical Park in the Cape Horn Biosphere Reserve, Chile, at the southern end of the Americas since 2000, where it has oriented transdisciplinary work for the creation of new protected areas and ecotourism practices. FEP enables an integration of biophysical, cultural, and institutional dimensions into the design of ecotourism activities that transform and broaden the perceptions of tourists, local guides, students, and other participants to better appreciate local biological and cultural diversity. FEP’s methodology is starting to be adapted in other world regions, such as Germany, Japan, and Mexico, to integrate education and ecotourism for sustainability.

Field Environmental Philosophy: A Biocultural Ethic Approach to Education and Ecotourism for Sustainability

Visiting natural environments could restore health and contribute to human sustainability. However, the understanding of potential linkages between restoration of visitors and nature-based tourism remains incomplete, resulting in a lack of orientation for researchers and managers. This study aimed to explore how visitors achieve restoration through nature by analyzing published literature on tourism. Using a systematic review method, this study examined destination types, participant traits, theoretical foundations, and potential restorative outcomes presented in 34 identified articles. A new framework that synthesizes relevant research and conceptualizes the restorative mechanisms of nature-based tourism from a human-nature interaction perspective was developed. Owing to the limitations in the theories, methods, cases, and the COVID-19 pandemic, interdisciplinary methods and multisensory theories are needed in the future to shed further light on the restoration of visitors through nature-based tourism. The findings provide a theoretical perspective on the consideration of nature-based tourism as a public-wellness product worldwide, and the study provides recommendations for future research in a COVID-19 or post-COVID-19 society.

https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/5/2299/pdf

Restoration of Visitors through Nature-Based Tourism: A Systematic Review, Conceptual Framework, and Future Research Directions.

Implementing sustainable ecotourism in Lafour region, Iran: Applying a clustering method based on SWOT analysis

Sustainable tourism involves increasingly attracting visitors while preserving the natural capital of a destination for future generations. To foster tourism while protecting sensitive environments, coastal managers, tourism operators, and other decision-makers benefit from information about where tourists go and which aspects of the natural and built environment draw them to particular locations. Yet this information is often lacking at management-relevant scales and in remote places. We tested and applied methods using social media as data on tourism in The Bahamas. We found that visitation, as measured by numbers of geolocated photographs, is well correlated with counts of visitors from entrance surveys for islands and parks. Using this relationship, we predicted nearly 4 K visitor-days to the network of Bahamian marine protected areas annually, with visitation varying more than 20-fold between the most and least visited parks. Next, to understand spatial patterns of tourism for sustainable development, we combined social media-based data with entrance surveys for Andros, the largest island in The Bahamas. We estimated that tourists spend 125 K visitor-nights and more than US$45 M in the most highly visited district, five times that of the least visited district. We also found that tourists prefer accessible, natural landscapes—such as reefs near lodges—that can be reached by air, roads, and ferries. The results of our study are being used to inform development and conservation decisions, such as where to invest in infrastructure for visitor access and accommodation, siting new marine protected areas, and management of established protected areas. Our work provides an important example of how to leverage social media as a source of data to inform strategies that encourage tourism, while conserving the environments that draw visitors to a destination in the first place.

https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/5/2427/pdf

Advancing Sustainable Development and Protected Area Management with Social Media-Based Tourism Data

Sustainability implementation in destination management

The purpose of the research presented here was to empirically assess resident perceptions of tourism development around the Changbai Mountain Biosphere Reserve (CMBR), a protected area straddling the China and North Korea border. Several theoretical approaches to the assessment of local resident attitudes towards tourism were reviewed and integrated into a novel factor-cluster assessment of residents in Erdaobaihe, the community most adjacent to CMBR. This analysis quantitatively grouped residents based on their perceptions of tourism’s economic, social, cultural, and environmental consequences for the town. An exploratory factor analysis of resident perceptual items first revealed six perception domains, and a subsequent cluster analysis then identified four distinct groups of residents based on these perceptions. A descriptive profile of each cluster and the significant differences among clusters are provided. Advancing our theoretical understanding of resident perspectives of tourism development, this cluster-based segmentation approach, demonstrated here, holds much promise for elaborating on the many ways that residents respond to new and long-standing forms of tourism in their communities. These theoretical and methodological contributions will be applicable to scholars as well as tourism practitioners and policy makers.

Lijun Niu

Papers

Evaluating residents’ perceptions of nature-based tourism with a factor-cluster approach