Is it only about “the Big 5″? February 17, 2008
Posted by Ralph Pina in : Conservation, Tourism, ecotourism , trackback
Every once in a while I trawl through the research output of academia, specifically in the fields of ecotourism, sustainable tourism and ecotourism certification. The other day I came across the following article in the Journal of Ecotourism (vol 6, no. 1, 2007) entitled “Wildlife viewing preferences of visitors to protected areas in South Africa: Implications for the role of ecotourism in conservation“.
The article’s conclusions are particularly interesting, given the prevailing wisdom in the tourism industry that tourists to Africa are only interested in seeing the “Big 5″ - leopard, lion, elephant, rhino and buffalo. Just recently we have been debating this issue in ecoAfrica, so the research is timeous and topical for us. I for one have always been loathe to accept that only the Big 5 holds any attraction to travellers to our continent.
By way of a brief background, ecotourism is regarded as vitally important to the continued survival and efficacy of protected areas and wilderness - whether owned by the state, private persons or communities - in most African states simply because it promises economic incentives for nature conservation and preservation. Although making conservation dependent on a fickle industry like tourism is extremely dangerous, the reality is that many poor African countries, faced with the developmental demands of burgeoning human populations, lack the funds to meet biodiversity conservation targets.
As the authors point out, if ecotourism is so vital, but simultaneously only caters for tourists’ narrow preferences for viewing “charismatic mega-fauna”, then it potentially skews conservation priorities. Savanna habitats, rather than woodland, deserts or mountain landscapes, would be conserved. Furthermore, only a few protected areas that conserve the Big 5 in adequate habitats would earn the bulk of tourism revenues. This is certainly the case in South Africa, where the Kruger National Park virtually finances the rest of the national park system. Mega-fauna are expensive to conserve, which means that only state protected areas have the resources and the ranges to sustainably maintain their populations. Community conservation areas, for whom ecotourism is touted as an economic solution, would thus be eliminated as viable ecotourism destinations.
Based on scientific surveys of tourists to a few of South Africa’s state and private protected areas, the authors come to some surprising - and hopeful - conclusions:
- While first-time visitors do have an understandable fixation on the Big Five and the big cats, the more experienced (in viewing wildlife) visitors are, the more they seek the unusual and smaller species and appreciate the greater web of life, the ecosystems.
- Older guests show a greater interest in bird and plant diversity, scenery and rarer species such as wild dog, sable, hyena, cheetah, etc.
- The same holds true to an even greater extent for “African” tourists (here I presume that “African” means local residents and does not refer to ethnic origin). This point perhaps underlines the importance of promoting ecotourism locally and not depending solely on the foreign market.
- 73% of visitors to the Kruger Park are South African, while 34% of respondents in the surveys had visited wildlife areas more than five times in the previous five years.
It is perhaps fortunate that once the Africa bug bites, it gets into your blood. It seems that it is our ancestral landscape and that “nostalgia”, that inexorable pull, keeps bringing people back. We at ecoAfrica see it in the numbers of return visitors over the years, and the numbers of clients who return multiple times.
For us it is important to know that greater experience in nature travel in Africa implies a need to have a “deeper” experience of Africa. ecoAfrica should be able to “track” this depth of experience and ultimately satisfy it by providing deeper and richer experiences of Africa’s unmatched diversity.
Comments»
Well, first, thank you for clearing up just what is meant by THE BIG 5. I’d been looking at various tour sites to begin research on a trip I plan to take in a few years and they all mentioned the Big 5 but never elaborated. My first thought was the big cats - but that’s because I love them, big or small. Amazing predators with amazingly different social structures from one species to the next.
For me, I could care about the rhino or buffalo and would prefer not to meet an angry hippo in a river. But when I go, I’d like to see the cats - lion, leopard, cheetah and any smaller cats roaming the savannah (those closer in size to domesticated cats and still wild interest me because I don’t know enough about them), mountain gorillas, antelope, zebra, elephants, giraffes and even those cackling, tenacious hyenas.
Maybe from afar you can show me crocs and hippos, wildebeest and buffalo. I’d also like to know more about the birds of Africa. My aunt and uncle have been big bird watchers since I was small so I’m curious what feathered friends survive the wilds of Africa.