The World Bank is committed to tackling the world’s toughest development challenges – especially poverty and inequality. All of our resources – our global development knowledge, investment capital, financial expertise and country presence – are devoted to making the world a more just and prosperous place. Tourism can play an integral role in helping us fulfill this mission. In many developing countries, tourism promotes inclusive economic growth, creating jobs and attracting foreign investors.
Nature-based tourism is a growing sector, and last year the World Bank released its Sustaining Sustainable Livelihoods through Wildlife Tourism report describing how nature-based tourism can be used by developing countries to diversify economies while protecting biodiversity and contributing to sustainable development.
The World Bank is interested to understand what tools and resources are already available to support developing countries plan for and implement sustainable nature-based tourism offerings. So the World Bank has commissioned a comprehensive review of the tools and knowledge resources that could be used both by World Bank staff, protected area authorities, and those that provide technical support, to help prepare and implement better nature-based tourism.
Here are some examples to illustrate:
- The IUCN’s Tourism and Protected Areas Specialist Group has developed Best Practice Guidelines for Tourism and Visitor Management in Protected Areas and a free IUCN Massive Open Online Course to accompany it, and also guidelines for tourism partnerships and concessions in protected areas with the Convention on Biological Diversity.
- The Adventure Travel and Tourism Association (ATTA) has research tools such as Adventure Tourism Destination Index (ATDI) which is a ranking of adventure tourism potential for countries around the world. They also provide adventure travel guide certification and performance standards module.
- The US Parks Service has a framework on planning tools that can be used to study the economic impacts of visitor spending in their national parks, and they have also developed a benefit sharing toolkit to guide sharing of benefits with local communities.
This initiative will provide a consolidated list of available tools and identify gaps of knowledge within nature-based tourism that can be used in the future to design new studies and technical papers. It will also generate a repository that contains all the information (guidelines, “how-to”, best practices), and a synthesis of valuable information.
We would like to invite to you to contribute to this process, through a short survey, to help ensure that all applicable tools and resources are captured.
The survey should take just 5-10 minutes to complete, and it will be open until 30 April 2019. To access the survey, click here, or paste this link into your web browser https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/WB_NBT_Survey
