By Cécile Fatteberg

Linking Tourism & Conservation likes to address the following call of our collaborator PANORAMA to the providers of the worldwide 52 LT&C-Examples. Suppose they can also bring their examples of tourism supporting protected areas on the PANORAMA platform. In that case, it only can make their practical examples more widely and globally known and hopefully inspire others to replicate or learn from their solutions:

‘Sustainable Tourism and Protected Areas in a Post-COVID World’ is a project led by IUCN on behalf of GIZ and the German Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). It is implemented by the IUCN Global Protected and Conserved Areas Programme in collaboration with Planeterra and other partners.

Tourism is a key economic driver to support protected areas and provide an important instrument to foster the public’s and local communities’ connections to protected areas. Within the context of the global COVID-19 pandemic, tourism is one of the most impacted sectors, affecting economies, livelihoods, public services and opportunities on all continents. 

The goal of the project is to deliver sustainable community-based tourism development, with a focus on flagship protected areas across Peru and Vietnam, building on – and informing – international best practices.

In each country, IUCN will specifically address tourism sustainability in the context of fair and effective management of selected protected areas, building back better through sustainable community-based tourism products that support post-COVID-19 recovery and increase resilience to future impacts.

In addition, a cross-cutting international component will provide support, tools and knowledge sharing on how to enable community-based tourism in a post-COVID world.

In this context, we are collecting examples of best practices to document in a PANORAMA solutions format. PANORAMA – Solutions for a Healthy Planet is an online open-access portfolio of best practices around the world, which have demonstrated tangible positive impacts in terms of nature conservation and sustainable development. We are looking for successful examples that showcase the following topics:

• Sustainable tourism / nature-based tourism activities, involving and benefiting local communities (tourism jobs, benefit sharing mechanisms to support local infrastructures, alternative livelihoods development, etc.);
• Pandemic mitigation, recovery plans and coping mechanisms (green jobs / cash-for-work) that were implemented to compensate for the decline of visitors and overall tourism activities;
• Successful implementation of diversified income sources to support the Protected and Conserved Areas operations and local communities;
• Virtualization of site visits; and
• Other relevant experiences of successful community-based tourism and/ or systems to address impacts of the pandemic on tourism dependent indigenous and local communities, especially in developing countries.

We believe that you, members of Linking Tourism & Conservation, could contribute immensely given the examples that you have posted on your website. Many of you have extensive experience and proven successes in those topics. We would be grateful if you would contribute a solution on the PANORAMA platform. 

Please contact me (cecile.fattebert@iucn.org), if you are interested and I’ll introduce you to the website and the solution template.