“Australia has some of the most iconic natural areas in the world,” says Kelly Bricker, Board Chair for both the International Ecotourism Society based in Washington, DC, and the Global Sustainable Tourism Council, “and it has made a commitment to continually look for ways to conserve and protect them.”
This commitment is nothing new. Since 1991, tourism professionals in Australia have been fine-tuning their ecotourism goals. “They spent 10 years developing a certification program for ecotourism and since then have continued to modify and change it with the times,” says Bricker, adding that “Australia is a leader in this regard.”
But like anywhere that puts its natural assets on display, Australia faces challenges if it wants to ensure that this beauty doesn’t fade. For starters, the continent is a long way from…just about everywhere else.
Shana Pereira, a spokesperson for Tourism Queensland, says that this is undoubtedly one of Australia’s biggest challenges in terms of its ecotourism goals.
With little it can do about the geographical limitations, she says, “on arrival in Australia, the tourism industry is actively engaged in minimizing the environmental footprint of travel within [the country].”
It’s a country perhaps more aware than most others about the effects of climate change. It is, of course, home to world-renowned environmental scientist Tim Flannery, who, in 2005 sounded the alarm regarding Australia’s future – and has continued to ever since. In an interview with The World Today, Flannery said that “of all the developed countries, Australia…faces the bleakest future… A lot our biodiversity is already under threat and we’re in a part of the globe where those climate impacts will, by the nature of the atmospheric circulation, be quite severe.”
