People all over the world have become conscious of the need to preserve the resources of the planet and become more efficient in their use of energy to reduce the impacts of global warming.
So says the Planet Safe Partnership website, developed for the regional tourism office Tourism Tropical North Queensland.
Such is the economic importance of tourism to TNQ, that its regional tourism office has identified a need to adjust its marketing strategies to mitigate the adverse impacts of the global warming phenomenon on travel patterns.
Key criteria for partnership within this initiative requires an energy audit to be undertaken through an Australian Government accreditation program; a commitment must be made to reduce the carbon footprint to Australian Government targets (as a minimum); and commitment to environmentally-friendly operational practices (as new technologies and equipment comes online).
The consequences of non-involvement are exclusion from a government-sponsored marketing partnership.
I wonder if Tourism Tropical North Queensland considered the failings of previous accreditation schemes before embarking this latest scheme? The National Ecotourism Accreditation Program was supposed to do what this lower-level initiative aims for. Likewise GreenGlobe21.
Tourism and Travel is apparently the world’s largest industry and on that basis it should be encouraged to optimise its benefits and minimise its adverse impacts. Should any community in the world be expected to suffer the intrusion of tourism if it is no better off?
Hackneyed overtures such as taking only photographs and leaving only footprints, need to be expunged for their failure to ensure that it is appropriate for photographs to be taken and that meaningful economic contributions are left to ensure the conservation of the environment and the improvement in the well-being of the local people.
At its most fundamental, it would be appropriate that any accreditation scheme that aims to encourage travel ethics is in itself incorruptible.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
With all the wild pigs etc.. you have up there in NQ hunting safaris should be encouraged.
As far as I can see, holiday makers are attracted to warmer, rather than cooler places. Why then is a warming general climate assumed to be a negative for tourism? Won’t it be an advantage? Bali (or Morocco) comes to Melbourne. Coconut palms waving over Tasmania … that sort of thing.
Davey,
It’s not that a warmer climate will necessarily discourage travel, but that the fear being peddled through the global warming hysteria and the growing weight of guilt, will discourage air-travel as a major contributor to atmospheric degradation.
Much of the reason why tourism is so important is that it is one of the few industries where returns flow to the businesses involved.
If the state government returned just a fraction of what it got from the coal industry in NQ, there would be a much lesser reliance on tourism.
It’s all marketing — kind of like a certain former USA VP who’s heavily invested in anti-AGW companies and technologies. In the old days, we used to call them touts; and old-fashioned justice used to be reserved for the more egregious of those. Now we actually pay them 100,000USD to do the dirty deed?