The conservation of biological diversity is urgent, insufficient, and underfunded. Practical conservation involves social as well as natural sciences, and multiple stakeholders including private, community and non-government organisations (NGOs) as well as government and multilateral agencies. Amongst these stakeholders, NGOs are assuming an increasingly important role, through: formal and informal political lobbying; buying or covenanting land for conservation; and forming partnerships to undertake specific conservation projects. Establishing conservation-oriented ecotourism enterprises is one such approach. These enterprises aim to switch land and resource use from consumption to conservation, and to resist external threats such as large-scale land use change associated with primary industries. This approach requires that non-profit NGOs, and their project partners, must operate within the competitive commercial tourism sector.
This is an excerpt from an article published on Journals.plos.org by Tania P. Romero-Brito, Ralf C. Buckley and Jason Byrne.
