Nike a Sustainable Enterprise

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3. ISSUES: PROGRESS AND CHALLENGES
3.1. Tourism and the Environment
The natural environment is an important resource for tourism. With increasing urbanisation, destinations in both industrialised
and developing countries with significant natural features, scenery, cultural heritage or biodiversity are becoming
increasingly popular sites for tourist destinations. Efforts to preserve and enhance the natural environment should therefore
be a high priority for the industry and for governments. But the reality is not quite as clear cut. Environments where
past human interaction has been minimal are often fragile. Small islands, coastal areas, wetlands, mountains and deserts,
all now popular as tourist destinations, are five of the six ‘fragile ecosystems’ as identified by Agenda 21 that require
specific action by governments and international donors. The biophysical characteristics of these habitats often
render them particularly susceptible to damage from human activities. As the scale of tourism grows, the resource use
threatens to become unsustainable. With a degraded physical environment, the destination is in danger of losing its
original attraction, increasing the levels of cheaper mass tourism and forcing more “nature-based” tourism to move on to
new destinations, which are likely to be even more inaccessible and fragile. Mainstream “ecotourism”, as promoted after
the Rio Earth Summit, hasn’t always enjoyed a good reputation. Tour operators have used the concept merely as a
“greenwash” marketing tool. In reality it often meant introducing unsustainable levels of tourism into fragile areas, having
scant regard for either the environment or for the residents of the destination areas. As the International Council for Local
Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) pointed out:
“Tourism in natural areas, euphemistically called “eco-tourism,” can be a major source of degradation of local ecological,
economic and social systems. The intrusion of large... [continues]

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