Chinese EcoTourism Year Aims for Green Tourists

Research by the China National Tourism Association (CNTA) and PATA indicates that rural tourist destinations in China now attract 300 million visitors annually while the UNWTO predicts China will become the world’s largest inbound travel destination by 2020.

NGOs and environmentalists have now turned their efforts to Chinese tourism. WWF has established a scheme to train local guides at nature reserves in Sichuan, while in Yunnan, The Nature Conservancy has established the country’s first green national park, Pudacuo, which is modeled on the American national park system. Other efforts include a scattered number of eco-lodges and smaller projects like Haobao Organic Farm, located in a valley outside of Kunming and run by a local Chinese farmer.

This year the CNTA has named 2009 “Chinese Ecotourism Year” and kicked off the year with a party in Sanya, Hainan attended by the mayor, the governor of Hainan, the deputy governor of Yunnan and a dozen tourism officials. The slogan for China’s ecotourism year encourages citizens to “be a green traveler and experience eco-civilization,”

China has been quick to spot the benefits of ecotourism. Developing tourism in scenic areas located in remote parts of the country has the potential to distribute wealth to poor rural populations. In addition, China’s surfeit of natural landscapes, rivers, mountain ranges and minority groups present plenty of opportunities for the development of green tourist attractions.

The market potential is also clearly enormous. China’s tourism industry is one of the fastest-growing in the world, with an annual growth rate of 7.8% since 1995. Tourism contributes close to USD 150 billion to the domestic economy,

According to the CNTA, while the number of inbound tourists fell last year for the first time since the SARS outbreak in 2003, this was more than offset by a sharp rise in domestic tourism. Last year more than 1.61 billion domestic holidays were taken in China, a 14% year-on-year increase, according to CNTA figures.

The fact that domestic tourists make up the bulk of China’s travelers may pose a problem for the ecotourism sector. While attitudes are slowly changing, Chinese travelers for the most part do not demand green travel options. Much of the country’s tourism infrastructure is geared towards the mass-market.

Because of the domestic-accented nature of travel in China, ecotourism in China will also inevitably be different from other popular green tourist destinations in Asia, such as Nepal, India or Thailand, where the majority of tourists are inbound foreigners.

Nonetheless, this Chinese brand of ecotourism has been making headway since the 1980s. In 1982, the first national forest park was established in Zhangjiajie, Hunan, and was designated a UNESCO World Natural Heritage site. Since then, China has established a host of park reserves — as of 2007, there were more than 2,300 natural reserves — although few are managed as well as the Pudacuo National Park, which was launched along with a 10-year plan to build a network of three major park areas in Yunnan. The creation of the park increased the amount of land under conservation in the region as much as 10-fold and also formed the basis of community programs to train locals for park-related jobs.

Government support is also not an altogether recent phenomenon. Chinese tourism authorities named 1999 as the year of the “Eco-Tour,” with an emphasis on promoting nature tourism. In 2002, WWF and the tourism research branch of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences held an ecotourism forum in Beijing, gathering representatives from the tourism, environmental protection, forestry and water resources sectors. A similar forum was held that same year in Kunming.

However, while China has a growing number of tourism projects purporting to be green, it is yet to establish norms as to what can and cannot be called “ecotourism.” Neither does the country use international certification such as Green Globe, a global benchmarking system based on the Agenda 21 principles for sustainable development drawn up at the UN Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, and which is largely recognized elsewhere as a guarantee of a project’s environmental credentials.

As of 2006, only two hotels, two parks and one museum in China had been Green Globe certified, according to a 2007 paper, Chinese Perspectives on Tourism Eco-certification, by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and Griffith University in Australia.

Source: Lily Kuo, China International Business

Valere Tjolle