Community eco-tourism in rural Peru: Resilience and adaptive capacities to the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change

Abstract

The recent outbreak of COVID-19 has been devastating for international tourism, adversely affecting destinations, organizations, and local communities. In particular, the crisis highlights the need for local communities reliant on rural tourism to enhance their resilience to the risks simultaneously generated by the pandemic and accelerating impacts of climate change. This is important as the effects of these hazards are intertwined and cannot be treated in isolation. We explore community responses and resilience through case study Quebrada Verde, Peru, a small rural community in the Andes Mountains. Specifically, we report on a qualitative examination involving in-depth semi-structured interviews and focus groups with key informants from the community, supplemented by relevant documentary analysis. Drawing on community resilience and social networks perspectives, we find that the community's preparedness to both threats is unbalanced. On one hand, the community eco-tourism system has developed sufficient tools to adapt to the temporary effects of COVID-19 derived from the community's self-organization skills and topophilia. Specifically, the community possesses a cohesive social structure, it has a solid cultural identity rooted in its customs and traditions, and maintains a social humour that enables it to see the positive aspects of adversity. On the other hand, the analysis of the measures towards strengthening the resilience to climate change delivers mixed results. In particular, the relationship that the community has built with other local organizations to successfully prevent and react to climate change is weak. Therefore, stronger efforts towards bridging this gap must be implemented in order to sustain the wider social network of such organizations, of which the community is a part. This would enable further development and implementation of appropriate risk management strategies to counteract climate change, enhancing the community's resilience of its eco-tourism system to this emergent threat. Importantly, this finding might be relevant to other local communities seeking to improve their resilience to COVID-19 and climate change.

Travel Motivation during COVID-19: A Case from Nepal

“…This result is opposite to Roman et al [70], who found agritourism was the main attraction during COVID-19 in Poland. If community homestays are well prepared by bonding through social networks and conveying a message that they are ready and willing to host tourists, they can overcome such a crisis [92]. Rural destinations, including rural villages and travel motivation, had a significant connection (5%) and 4th contributor in marginal effects calculation.…”

Intelligent Digital Platform for Community-Based Rural Tourism—A Novel Concept Development in Peru

“…The practical implications of the rural tourism evolution, however, are complex, largely due to its dynamic and multifaceted nature [6,36]. Tourism activity, in essence, demands direct and indirect connections between different sectors of the economy [28], such as restaurants, construction, and artisanal productions [1].…”

“…However, the closing of borders in an effort to contain the COVID-19 pandemic has seriously impacted the sector, reducing the number of travelers around the world by 60-80% [1,5]. As a result, individuals and organizations faced the challenge of reinventing and optimizing their operations, seeking new strategies to adapt to a temporarily collapsing market [1,6]. In this context, as international borders remained closed and the desire to travel increased after months of social distancing, rural destinations became an attractive option, especially for domestic tourists [7,8].…”

Social and Political Issues on Sustainable Development in the Post Covid-19 Crisis

“…Community resilience exists as an interaction between individuals and their communities, determining the success of the community in meeting the needs of members in dealing with crises (Kimhi et al 2020) including during COVID-19 (Rippon et al 2020). During the pandemic, community resilience was quite successful in building a situation to face a crisis, such as what happened in community eco-tourism in rural Peru (Gabriel-Campos et al 2021), community nurses in Massachusetts (Baughman et al 2021), the newspaper community in the United States (Finneman et al 2021), and community pharmacy in Ontario Canada (Austin & Gregory 2021). In this context there was a role for local government as in the United States (Entress et al 2020) and the United Kingdom (South et al 2020) It is important that in terms of the elderly in China, the elderly's high trust in the government allowed them to be calmer in dealing with the pandemic (Zhang et al 2021).…”