Sustainable wildlife tourism in the context of climate change: the case study of Ngorongoro conservation area, Tanzania
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Date
2014-04
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Victoria University Melbourne, Australia
Abstract
Attaining sustainability of wildlife tourism has been a challenge in a world of
uncertainty. This is even more so when the world’s climate is rapidly changing.
Scientific evidence suggests that climate change will continue and escalate into the
future. All sectors of the economy, including tourism, will be impacted by climate
change. Both the human and environmental systems of tourism will suffer the
consequences of climate change. Wildlife tourism is one of the tourism subsectors,
representing a strong interconnectedness between human and environmental systems,
recognised as being vulnerable to climate change. Thus, reducing vulnerability is
inevitable if wildlife tourism is to grow sustainably.
Adaptation is one of the two mechanisms for dealing with the consequences of climate
change. Wildlife tourism needs to adapt to climate change for it to grow sustainably.
Despite this recognition, very little research has been undertaken on how wildlife
tourism worldwide can adapt to climate change. As a result, the contribution of research
on how wildlife tourism can be sustained has remained elusive. A common feature is
the lack of an effective framework for addressing climate change adaptation in wildlife
tourism. A review of existing climate change adaptation frameworks found that none of
them focused on wildlife tourism destinations. This thesis proposes a conceptual
Wildlife Tourism Climate Change Adaptation Framework (WTCCAF) to assist wildlife
tourism to adapt to climate change.
Three steps were adopted to develop such a framework. The first step involved
reviewing existing climate change adaptation frameworks for tourism more generally.
This review was done in order to understand the context and scope from which these
frameworks can be undertaken. Because attaining sustainable wildlife tourism has been
a major and urgent issue for wildlife tourism practitioners; the review of literature on
climate change adaptation was preceded by the review of sustainable wildlife tourism
development frameworks. This was deemed important to develop a theoretical
sustainability base against which the review of climate change adaptation frameworks
could be evaluated. The outcome of this review was the development of a theoretical
climate change adaptation framework grounded in sustainable wildlife tourism
development theories.
The second step involved testing the newly developed framework in the field. The
formulated framework adopted the following terminologies: shocks and stressors and
exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity frequently used in climate change studies. In
this thesis these terminologies are used as key themes for assessing the vulnerability of
wildlife tourism. Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA) was selected as a case study
for testing the developed framework. The purpose of this test was to understand the
factors that heighten the vulnerability of NCA to climate change. This in turn helped to
adjust the developed theoretical framework to reflect what was happening on the ground
in the field. Primary data were collected from key practitioners of NCA wildlife tourism
system including conservationists, tourism businesses and local community. The
methods of data collection include in-depth interviews and focus group discussions
supplemented with informal conversations and observations. Overall, 86 practitioners
participated in this research.
The third step involved the development of a conceptual climate change adaptation
framework (i.e. WTCCAF) based on key findings of this study. The intention of this
framework is to provide wildlife tourism practitioners with a tool to guide them in
developing climate change adaption interventions. Thus this framework makes a
contribution to the fields of wildlife tourism and conservation, particularly when climate
change is acknowledged as a major threat to the sustainability of wildlife tourism. This
thesis however recommends that because not every climate related issue was captured in
this study, further research is deemed necessary.
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Keywords
Wildlife tourism, Climate change, Ngorongoro conservation area, Tanzania