Tourism in sub-global assessments of ecosystem services
本文首次详细分析了14个生态系统服务次全球评估中如何呈现旅游业,发现旅游业专家参与不足,限制了评估作为管理工具的有效性,并呼吁在生态评估中更多融入可持续旅游的最新进展。
Published in 2005, the United Nations Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) stressed that influencing governments, businesses and communities to address the supra-national challenge of limiting biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation requires a fuller understanding of the range of values and benefits people derive from ecosystems, including tourism. The MA was informed by, and has shaped, several conceptually and methodologically distinctive sub-global assessments (SGAs) of ecosystem services. Through content analysis, this paper is the first detailed examination of how tourism features in 14 extant SGAs identified in a database held by a major supra-national environmental organization. Although the SGAs should have incorporated the widest range of specialist subject expertise, tourism scholars played only peripheral roles in producing them even for territories where tourism is a significant land use. The SGAs examined did not benefit from the extensive body of knowledge relating to sustainable tourism. Limited portrayals of tourism restrict the capacity of SGAs in their current format as management solutions. It is also contradictory to the ethos, principles and purpose of ecosystem assessments. With the ecosystem services perspective set to become more important to policy and decision making, the paper argues for greater incorporation of recent progress in sustainable tourism in ecosystem assessment.