Climate Change, Tourism, and Community Development: Perceptions of Maun Residents, Botswana

Abstract

Tourism is a key economic sector and tool for community development in most developing countries. However, climate change remains one of the major threats to this development. This is especially so for countries such as Botswana whose tourism industry is largely nature based making it vulnerable to the effects of environmental change. Consequently, communities who rely on tourism to some extent are also vulnerable to global climate change and its local effects. The purpose of this paper is to examine community perceptions with regards to the tourism-climate change nexus in Maun, a key tourism hub in Botswana and dependent on the tourism economy. Data collection was done by means of a household survey. Interestingly, the results showed that most local people do not perceive tourism highly, as a source of income. In practice, they depended on other forms of livelihoods like formal employment and farming. Furthermore, even though they have noted some changes in the environment and climate, they generally did not know the resultant impacts despite acknowledging that the tourism industry is bound to be affected. The low awareness levels may lead to inaction, and hence a clarion call to decision makers to develop information and adaptation strategies for communities that host tourist attractions to ensure resilience to anticipated effects of global climate change.

Climate Change, Time and Tourism Knowledge: The Relativity of Simultaneity

“…Climate clocks, such as the clock developed by the Human Impact Lab, define the time that is available to arrest the negative effects of CO 2 emissions (see methodology in [77]), and the role of clocks is to conceptualise a framing of time that is particular to a "stage of societal development and self-regulation" (Deem, 1996, [78] (p. 16)). Whilst often not explicitly referring to clocks, individual academics have concurred with the idea of a climate imperative that is inherent in such temporal discussions [79][80][81], with many tertiary institutions and individuals also signing on to initiatives, including the 2021 Glasgow Declaration: A Commitment to a Decade of Tourism Climate Action (https://www.oneplanetnetwork.org/ programmes/sustainable-tourism/glasgow-declaration (accessed on 2 October 2022)) and the Tourism Declares a Climate Emergency (https://www.tourismdeclares.com/ (accessed on 2 October 2022)).…”

How Does Sustainable Rural Tourism Cause Rural Community Development?

“…They found that sustainable rural tourism positively affects community development. In addition, Hambira et al [29] took Botswana as a sample to study the effect of rural tourism on community development. Using data collected by means of a household survey to perform an empirical analysis, they found that rural tourism is a positive key tool for community development.…”

Mainstreaming climate change in policy frameworks for community-based natural resource management in a semi-arid savannah environment: case study of Botswana

“…Among those related to either tourism or CBNRM, very few relate to the global South and none to Botswana (Henry, 2009;GIZ, 2019;Becken et al, 2020). To date, studies on tourism and climate change in Botswana have focused mainly on the impacts of climate change on tourism and vice versa (Mbaiwa, 2003(Mbaiwa, , 2005Hambira, 2011;Dube et al, 2018;Hambira et al, 2021). Therefore, this study on mainstreaming climate change in CBNRM initiatives in Botswana is a welcome addition to the literature on climate change and tourism studies globally and regionally in the context of the global South, where a dearth of such research exists (Van der Merwe, 2022).…”