The significance of environmental values for destination competitiveness and sustainable tourism strategy making: insights from Australia's Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area

Abstract

Sustainable destinations must deliver products that perform better than their competitors and at the same time protect key environmental drawcards. This research explores the environmentalÀeconomic interface of a major destination, both as a case study in how to approach this complex relationship and as a contribution to the methodology of tackling the need for understanding competitive pressures as part of sustainable tourism strategy creation. Using the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area (GBRWHA) as an example, the paper assesses 21 key environmental values, including Indigenous culture, against market-based factors, in terms of their importance for visitors as regional drawcards, satisfaction with them and the way in which changes in them might affect trip numbers and duration across different regions. While the natural values of the GBRWHA are found to be the most important drawcards, satisfaction scores were significantly lower than importance scores for a number of these values. Visitors responded more negatively to the prospect of environmental degradation than to the prospect of a 20% increase in local prices: the detailed impact depends, however, on location and visitor mix. Clear ocean, healthy coral reefs, healthy reef fish, and lack of rubbish were the top four most important values.

Our Environmental Value Orientations Influence How We Respond to Climate Change

“…The certainty of an altered world where wellbeing cannot necessarily be associated with natural resource condition, is already becoming apparent (Barnett et al, 2016). Yet, people value many things about natural resources, particularly iconic resources such as the GBR (Stoeckl et al, 2014; Esparon et al, 2015; Farr et al, 2016). Natural resources support identity, pride, place, esthetic appeal, biodiversity, lifestyle, heritage, and agency (Marshall et al, 2018).…”

Tourism and Natural World Heritage: A Complicated Relationship

“…Where actual visitor numbers have been tracked, World Heritage listing has generally led to increases, though with a few exceptions (Rogerson and van der Merwe 2016). The broader regional economic consequences of tourism to WHAs have also been examined, for example, in Australia (Driml and Common 1996; Esparon et al 2015), Mali and Ethiopia (Farid 2015), and Norway (Kaltenborn et al 2013).…”

Research in Sustainable Tourism: A Longitudinal Study of Articles between 2008 and 2017

“…However, despite the popularity of indigenous tourism, operators in Australia still consider what they are doing to be for economic purposes and not related to sustainable tourism [82]. Moreover, various issues arise in communities where indigenous tourism is developing quickly, such as the protection of heritages [83], the upholding of the rights of indigenous populations [84], and the preservation of indigenous culture [85]. Empowering the residents in indigenous areas with knowledge, economic resources, and communication skills has been suggested to help sustain the development of indigenous tourism [86].…”