| Tourism: MAKING TOURISM SUSTAINABLE |
Unchecked expansion can threaten environment
Angie Knox
Tourist numbers are a key issue for Pacific Islands nations as they seek to balance economic development and sustainability, says a key tourism researcher from the University of the South Pacific.
Professor Jim McMaster told a recent conference in Port Vila that unchecked expansion of tourism in the Pacific region could threaten some fragile islands environments.
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Time to socialise... conference organiser Dr Juliet Roper (right) with other speakers at Port Vila. They are from left: Charlie Panakera, Eci Nabalarua, Jim McMaster and Tamati Reedy.
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“The focus in some countries is on attracting more and more tourists to generate economic growth, but there are limits on the capacity of the local environments to assimilate wastes generated by tourism growth and to supply up-market resorts with the large quantities of water they consume.”
Charlie Panakera of the University of Waikato Management School, who has practical experience of running tourism businesses in the Solomon Islands, said that environmental concerns were not always uppermost for Pacific Islanders and it was hard to translate commercial sustainability to local communities.
“Tourists used to see coconuts bobbing in the lagoon; now it’s more likely to be coke or beer cans.”
McMaster and Panakera were among 40 researchers and practitioners who met in Port Vila, Vanuatu, on June 25-27 for the first full conference of APABIS, the Asia-Pacific Academy of Business in Society. Jointly organised by the University of Waikato Management School and the University of the South Pacific, the conference focused on communities and sustainable development.
McMaster said effective national tourism planning systems were needed to control the location, environmental impact and type of tourism resort development, and to ensure that public infrastructure such as water and sewerage systems are developed to support private sector accommodation projects.
“In Fiji, there’s been great optimism about tourism as a job generator, but in reality there are about 17,000 school leavers chasing 3000 jobs each year, and we’re now seeing some workers migrating to the Cook Islands for higher paid tourism jobs,” he said.
“Look what’s happened in Hawaii, where the islands have been swamped by wealthy people making housing unaffordable for low-waged locals. We need to sit back and think seriously about what type of tourism we need.”
McMaster said that research showed backpackers can have a more beneficial impact on the host community, as they travel out to remote places and buy more local goods compared to high-spending tourists who stay in luxury foreign-owned hotels and consume a higher proportion of imported food and beverages.
Also speaking at the three-day conference was John Perrottet, an advisor on international tourism development with PEP-Pacific, which is managed by the International Finance Corporation, the private sector arm of the World Bank Group. It provides advisory services to private sector entrepreneurs in Pacific Island countries.
“Tourism is growing in the developing world at twice the global rate, and in Samoa it’s growing three times as fast,” he said. “Tourism businesses have to be sustainable, otherwise there’s no point in propping them up. We’re looking at ways to ‘grow the pie’, supporting regulatory frameworks and infrastructure development so that more local people benefit from tourist spending.”
Perrottet said Samoa’s recent rapid growth in tourism was underpinned by the creation of Polynesian Blue, a joint venture airline between Brisbane-based Virgin Blue and the Samoan government. The deal was structured by IFC’s Advisory Services team.
“Polynesian Blue is providing a regular stream of tourists to Samoa and we’re now working on upskilling local tourism operators to handle this growth in tourist demand.”
The conference also heard presentations on business-community partnerships, social entrepreneurship and economic sustainability.
McMaster talked about the online small business toolkits being developed by USP’s Pacific Centre for Entrepreneurship and Trade. “Our findings underscore the importance of building sustainability into local business development planning.”
From government regulations to eco-conscious consumers, there are certainly external pressures on businesses to be more sustainable, but what payback can a firm expect?
Dr Jarrod Haar and Dr Eva Collins from the University of Waikato Management School presented findings from a survey of 95 New Zealand firms with 50 or more employees.
“We found greening your business can have a beneficial impact on the firm’s performance, particularly where firms adopt a ‘bundle’ of environmental practices,” said Haar.
These include environmental management systems and supply chain, employee training on waste reduction and the firm’s environmental goals, membership of an environmental group or network, and the use of clean, green imagery in marketing.
“Just one of these factors on its own is probably not enough to make a difference. But put them together, and we found they accounted for six percent of both market performance and development performance in the firms we surveyed.”
That may not sound a lot, said Collins, but it is significant. “A related study shows that having an entrepreneurial culture in a business accounted for 10 percent of market performance. No-one would suggest that entrepreneurship is irrelevant to business success. Well, our research shows the same may be true of environmental practices.”
Other topics under discussion at the conference included social and workplace wellbeing and globalisation, with contributors from the United States, New Zealand and Australia.
Professor Juliet Roper of the University of Waikato Management School, who founded APABIS with the endorsement of the European Academy of Business in Society, said the organisation aims to provide training and tools to develop sustainable business.
“The conference brought together researchers and practitioners from across the Asia-Pacific region. Some of the collaborative research we are now developing includes projects to gain a better understanding of what sustainability means to local communities, to develop case studies of corporate involvement in communities, and examine the success or failure of aid agency-funded projects.”
• Angie Knox is the Media Relations Manager at the University of Waikato.
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