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David Morgans
 Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. It's certainly my great pleasure to be here with you this afternoon. And at the outset, I want to thank APTEC for their kind invitation to participate and present at this important forum for the future of tourism-based community development.
 
 This afternoon I want to focus on highlighting the leadership role that ecotourism can play in tourism-based community development, and I will present some examples of how ecotourism is contributing to the communities in my home state of Queensland in Australia, and specifically what my organization, Tourism Queensland, is doing in that area. For your information, Tourism Queensland is the Queensland Government body charged with overseeing the planning, development and marketing of tourism in Queensland. So my presentation this afternoon will be highlighting a role for government in helping communities to have a greater ownership of tourism outcomes.
 
 What I would like to do first is to highlight the important role of ecotourism in community development. To do that I first want to compare some key definitions. The first definition I would like to talk to is community development. There are obviously many definitions of community development but the one I have chosen here, from Horvich reads:
"The empowerment of existing local groups to control and manage valuable resources in ways that not only sustain the resources but also meet the social, cultural and economic needs of the group. "
 Now from that definition I draw some key elements that I think we should focus on, and those key elements are:
 empowerment of local groups,
 local groups controlling their own resources,
 sustaining those resources and meeting social, cultural and economic needs.
 The second definition that I want to look at, and the previous speaker Dr. Varma, referred to it, is ecological sustainable development, commonly referred to as ESD. ESD is :
"Using, conserving and enhancing the community's resources so that ecological processes on which life depends are maintained and the total quality of life now and in the future can be increased. "
 Now increasingly today we are hearing ESD spoken of in terms of the triple bottom line, the triple bottom line of ecological, economic and social/cultural sustainability. So drawing out again the key elements of that definition. ESD is about:
 using, conserving and enhancing community resources,
 ecological processes are to be maintained,
 quality of life is increased, and
 ecological, economic and social cultural sustainability.
 
 The final set of definitions that I want to refer to concern ecotourism. "Ecotourism" as a term was first used around about 15 years ago, and since then there have been as many definitions as you can imagine. But here are four that I have chosen which I think get to the heart of what ecotourism is. The first one from Young reads:
"Tourism to natural areas that fosters environmental understanding, appreciation and conservation, and sustains the culture and well -being of communities. "
 The second one, coming from the International Ecotourism Society:
"Ecotourism is responsible travel to natural areas that conserves the environment and sustains the well-being of local communities. "
 The third definition, one used by the Ecotourism Association of Australia:
"Ecologically sustainable tourism that fosters environmental and cultural understanding, appreciation and conservation. "
 And the final definition, the one that we use in Queensland, the one that is adopted by my State Government, reads:
"Ecotourism is nature-based tourism that involves education and interpretation of the natural environment and is managed to be ecologically sustainable. "
 Again looking at the key elements of all those definitions we see that ecotourism is about:
 tourism that is dependent on the natural environment wherethe natural environment must predominate in the tourism experience.
 being ecologically sustainable.
 making a contribution to the conservation of nature.
 haveing strong elements of education and interpretation of the natural and cultural environment.
 being culturally sustainable
 sustaining local communities,
 being economically sustainable, as with all forms of tourism, because if the tourism cannot make profits, then you will not get those other benefits flowing through to the wider community.
 people having fun, it must be enjoyable, and it must draw out those elements of relaxation and fun that people need because unless it is that, unless there is that fun and relaxation in the tourism experience, we cannot hope to get across these other key elements of learning about nature, protecting nature and putting something back into the community.
 The last point I want to make about ecotourism is that ecotourism is not defined by scale. It doesn't necessarily have to be small scale. It can be large scale. Ecotourism should be judged not by its size but by adherence to those key elements that I have just spoken to you about.
 So we have three definitions there of community development, of ecologically sustainable development, and of ecotourism. And I believe when we look at those definitions, we see there are some very key common themes. The first theme in all of those definitions looked at ecological, economic, social and cultural sustainability, and the second theme in all those definitions had a very strong focus on involving and sustaining local communities. I believe that those key themes are also very much reflected in the APTEC document when it looks at the benefits of tourism based community development, and those three areas that the guidebook looks at are:
 developing a sense of community,
 benefiting regional invigoration and
 promoting the sustainment of nature, historical assets, the living environment and the local identity and culture of areas.
 So from those definitions I would argue that ecotourism is very much leading the way for sustainable tourism. It also could be, I believe, the exemplar, the key representative, of what ecologic sustainable development is all about, with ecotourism very much leading the way in tourism-based community development.
 So why all the interest in ecotourism? Why has there been such a strong focus, particularly in the last decade on ecotourism? There are a number of reasons for that. Ecotourism is not just a short-term tourism fad. It isn't something that will be gone in a few years time. Ecotourism has shown itself to be a very clear and definite growing market in the tourism industry. And for that reason there is a lot of focus, particularly in my home country, on ecotourism, to grow that sector of the industry. So that's one reason.
 The second reason why there is a very strong focus on ecotourism is because ecotourism is seen as representing the 'greening' of the entire tourism industry. I believe that ecotourism will lead the rest of the tourism industry toward greater levels of sustainability. The new technologies, the better ways, the more sustainable ways of conducting tourism that are being learned in ecotourism, we are now seeing in our country flowing through into mainstream tourism, whether it's in energy conservation, whether it's in water conservation, and whether it's in making contributions to communities. What we are learning in ecotourism is now flowing through to mainstream tourism industry.
 Third point: Ecotourism is really a response to the demands of a much more environmentally aware community. We now have a community that is demanding environmentally responsible tourism product. The worldwide community is recognizing the fragility of this planet. We all have to live more sustainably on our planet, and lots of moves are being taken to do that. So when people choose their holiday, they don't just switch off, they are demanding environmentally responsible tourism products. So ecotourism is again a response to the demands of that community.
 Fourth reason: The economic benefits, the obvious economic benefits from ecotourism. What maybe not so obvious is that ecotourism, the benefits from it, tend to be more regionally dispersed than traditional tourism which tends to focus on key tourism areas, like in my country places like Sydney, Ayres Rock, the Gold Coast and Cairns. And while ecotourism is occurring in those areas, ecotourism is drawing tourists further away from those established destinations and drawing them out into regional Australia, and particularly, regional Queensland, and the flow-on benefits for those regional communities can be quite valuable. We are seeing a revitalization of industry in regional Queensland, where the economy was based on farming and pastoral type developments, that is now plateaued out. And what ecotourism is doing is providing a greater diversification of industries in those communities and providing new jobs, helping to keep young people in those communities instead of letting them drift away to the big cities, it is bringing money into those communities that wasn't there before, and it's also focusing on providing new infrastructure. With more people going into regional Queensland, we are seeing roads upgraded, we are seeing railway lines upgraded, we are seeing new bridges being put in. So again, more benefits for regional communities.
 Along these lines I was interested to read this morning in the Japan Times of a local community here in Japan, a traditional fishing community, where fishing was basically the only industry. But now, because of quotas and limited catches there is less economic returns from fishing alone, so that small community is now looking at continuing their fishing in a reduced way but is now getting into whale watching. So they are diversifying their community, bringing people into the community, converting fishing boats into whale watching boats. So here is a clear case of a community in your own country that's diversifying to have a tourism outcome based on a traditional industry and what was very much a part of the culture of that community.
 But back to my home situation in Queensland, because of all these environmental, community and economic factors, in 1997 the Queensland Government, in the interest of making sure that ecotourism was developed in a sustainable way, produced the Queensland Ecotourism Plan. But it didn't produce it on its own. It developed this document in association with industryand the wider community. And the purpose of this documentwas to be a strategic state-wide document, providing a framework for planning, developing, managing, operating and marketing ecotourism in Queensland.
 The vision of the Plan was for ecotourism in Queensland to be ecologically, commercially, culturally and socially sustainable, very much reflecting the principles of ESD. That vision was to be achieved by four key objectives:
 environmental protection and management,
 ecotourism industry development,
 infrastructure development to support the ecotourism industry, and community development
Community developmentis rightup there in the four top objectives.
 And those four objectives were to be achieved by seven key strategies, namely,
 the identification of areas with high natural and cultural value,
 having the right management planning in place to ensure that ecotourism could develop sustainably,
 ecotourism product development,
 appropriate and sensitive marketing and promotion of ecotourism,
 the infrastructure development and the last two,
 local community development and general community development.
 And those strategies would be implemented by 36 specific actions that would need to be implemented if the Plan aims were going to be achieved. And those 36 actions are not just the responsibility of government but also industry and the community. And my organization, Tourism Queensland, has the lead agency status in Queensland for delivering on those strategies.
 Uunlike a lot of government documents, and I don't know whether it's the same here in Japan, but in our country a lot of these documents get produced and then they sit on a shelf and gather dust. But this document is very much a living document, and there is a very strong focus for it to be implemented. It's certainly a very strong focus for me, because if I don't implement it, I will get the sack. So my job is about implementing this document and we have to report on its implementation. We have some very clear time frames, to implement the Plan and in fact it comes up for review next year. The implementation time frames for the Plan are zero to two years and two to five years. The zero to two years, that' s gone by, that finished in 1997; we achieved about 85 percent of those actions, and we are still working on the remaining actions, and on the two to five years we are about 70 percent implemented. So we are very much on target in terms of delivering on these actions.
 However, it is one thing to have a document and say that you are implementing it, but what are we actually doing, what are we doing particularly for local communities in terms of delivering some benefits. There are many areas that we have been working in over the last four years to deliver on, and I will just touch on a few here.
 One of the key areas that we have been working on is community capacity building. We recognize as a government agency it is not our role to lead, it is not our role to make sure these things happen. It is our role to facilitate communities taking ownership for these tourism outcomes, and ensuring that they have a tourism outcome which reflects their community and brings benefits back into their community. So our role is simply to go out there and work with those communities. A particular case where we assisted a local community was in the Whitsundays, a community on the central Queensland coast, quite a beautiful part of Queensland coastline near the Great Barrier Reef. They wanted to get some ecotourism outcomes for their area but instead of us going up there and telling them what to do, we went up, helped them get their various community stakeholders together, and worked with them to ensure that their strategy embodied the principles of the Queensland Ecotourism Plan. We could then step back and allow the community to develop their own ecotourism plan for their particular part of Queensland. And they have done that, and produced a very worth-while document now which they are now implementing. The Whitsundays Ecotourism Strategy goes into more detail than the more strategic Queensland Ecotourism Plan, in terms of what sites should be developed and what sites should not be developed, how many people should go whereand how to help local businesses take advantage of the directions of their Strategy So, our role has not been so much leadership, it's been more about facilitating community outcomes.
 As a result of our experiences over the last four years, we are in the process of producing a 'working with local communities' publication, and that will be produced in the next two months. When it is produced, I will send a copy to my colleagues here to APTEC, so you can have access to it. Producing a document of this kind is very much a part of our philosophy in Tourism Queensland, to provide self-help materials for the tourism industry and the community so they can help themselves to develop good tourism outcomes. And one of our first publications is this document, called " Grow Your Ecotourism Business. " It's actually a two volume document. And it was really a response to the many questions we were getting from local communities and from tourism operators asking what do I have to do to have a good sustainable tourism outcome. The Environmental Tourism Unit I manage is only a small group of people and we don't have the time to talk to every group and to every industry operator. So what we have been endeavouring to do over the last four years is produce these types of materials that are written not as academic publications, but in simple English, what we call user-friendly language, it's not complicated, with lots of practical assistance in there and words of advice from people who are already in the industry.
 So, that is the type of work we have been doing. We also have had a strong focus in working with our aboriginal communities to try and get some tourism outcomes for them. But it's not only working with the aboriginal community so they can get tourism outcomes out of their cultural heritage, but even more than that, we are working with those communities so they can be involved in all aspects of tourism, not just presenting their culture, but in the whole planning, marketing and delivery of tourism, so aboriginal people can be involved to the fullest extent.
 We regularly run ecotourism workshops throughout the State. Just last week I came back from Western Queensland where we had a series of workshops. And we have been doing these now for the last three years, where we go out in the community, conduct these workshops at the time of day that suits that community. Generally it's in the evening, after people have finished work and can come along. And at those workshops we explain to them what ecotourism is, the pitfalls of being in the tourism industry, and we provide them with as much assistance we can in terms of understanding what may be the tourism outcomes for their communities.
 We also produce a newsletter called "Eco -trends, " which talks about trends in ecotourism. It's produced quarterly in a hard copy form, but it's also on Tourism Queensland's website, and constantly we use that as the major vehicle for getting to the ecotourism industry and the communities about the latest trends that are happening in ecotourism. That' s really important because that hasn't existed before, and it's a very important communication vehicle.
 Other publications we have produced, one here specifically targeting tour operators, provides information and advice for people who want to get into the tourism business and what they need to do to be good sustainable operators. And another publication here, 'Innovations in Interpretation', helping local communities and tourism operators to understand how they can better input interpretation and education materials into their tourism experiences. Again all these materials are about helping industry and helping communities to help themselves, because again I cannot state it strongly enough that unless the local communities have ownership for these tourism outcomes, they will not be respected and they will not be valued.
 And final publication I want to refer to here is a more of an educational resource as opposed to an industry self-help one, and it's a series of papers on best practice ecotourism in Queensland, what has happened with ecotourism in the last ten years. And we are constantly looking at new self-help materials to assist industry and communities. One that will be coming out in the next few months is something called the "ecotourism rapid assessment model " and it will be a simple check list of the sorts of things you need to take into account if you are looking at the ecotourism potential of a site or a region. Another self help resource we are currently producing is about environmental impact monitoring. Again Dr. Varma referred to the importance of monitoring and the key role that communities and industry have in ensuring that tourism activities are sustainable, because it is one thing to put a tourism operation in place, it's another to make sure that it is delivering what it originally said it would deliver. Monitoring has an important role to play and our aim with the impact monitoring publication is to assist operators and the community to monitor tourism performance.
 So that's some of the things we have been doing in terms of helping the community in Queensland get the best out of ecotourism. Another area we have been working on is this initiative called the Nature and Ecotourism Accreditation Program, NEAP for short This is an initiative of the Ecotourism Association of Australia, and it is an accreditation program that is being developed by industry for industry to provide assurance of genuine ecotourism product. We have a problem in our country, as I am sure elsewhere around the world where some people say they are ecotourism but they are not, they are not adhering to those key principles and they are just using the term "ecotourism" as a marketing ploy. This accreditation program is a world leader, it was the first and still the only one that is operating to any great extent, and we are fully supporting it in Queensland because we believe that industry-led accreditation is the way to go. And this is an important document not only for industry operators but also for communities, because with communities developing their own ecotourism products they can use this like a guidebook, because the way it works it just has all the principles of ecotourism in there and what you need to do to meet those principles. So it's not only an important accreditation program but it's also a valuable resource for those looking to get into the ecotourism industry. There are three levels of accreditation, nature tourism, ecotourism, and advanced ecotourism. And depending on how involved your operation is, the lowest level is nature tourism, the highest level being advanced ecotourism. Again, a world leading document, and currently the Ecotourism Association is talking to Green Globe which is a worldwide accreditation program, about incorporating the Nature and Ecotourism Accreditation Program within Greenglobe. So I think that highlights the high standing that the NEAP program has.
 And we have certainly been doing a lot in Queensland to assist the Program. Just quickly touching on here, the NEAP Accreditation looks at eight key areas. And those eight key areas reflect the principles of ecotourism I outlined before, but I will just bring your attention to two of them, cultural componentand working with local communities. Again there is that important element in there of working with local communities. And there are three key areas in the document that talk about the need to work with local communities:
 provision of local benefits,
 minimal impact on local communities, and
 community involvement.
So again, we have an accreditation program that has a very strong focus on community development.
 Although Tourism Queensland doesn't run this program, we strongly support it and we have provided support in many different ways. And again it highlights the role that a government agency should play, we don't have to be the one that's running this, and it's better that we don't run it as we believe it is better it's run by industry. But we can help and we have done so in many different ways. We have an annual journalist program where we pay a photographer and a journalist to develop stories about ecotourism properties that are accredited under the NEAP program, so they get free promotion in local newspapers and in magazines, which is worth many thousands of dollars. But the only operations that get those free stories are the ones that are accredited. We have run regional workshops to assist the Ecotourism Association to explain the NEAP program. We have provided corporate promotional material which goes out to all accredited ecotourism operators, so they can display and show to their consumers that they are an accredited operator. We have worked with the marketing division of Tourism Queensland to make sure that in every brochure that we produce, and we produce thousands of them, that in every one of those brochures there is an explanation of what the accreditation program is. And every accredited ecotourism operator that is on our books has their logo, the accreditation logo, up against their products. So again, it's about providing that support to what are industry-led initiatives. And we have also provided money for the extension of the NEAP program.
 The final initiative I would like to talk to you about this afternoon is something called the Queensland Heritage Trials Network. This is a joint program between the Queensland State Government, and the Federal Government in Australia. It is a 100 million Australian dollar program, which is I think about 6 billion yen, over three years, to put money into heritage tourism infrastructure. Now, that money is being provided by the State and Federal Governments but it is communities that are deciding how that money is spent, again government assisting communities to have a say in their tourism outcomes. And the aim of the program is very much to foster good sustainable tourism outcomes. It's about creating employment, particularly in regional Queens land. It's about stimulating regional development, but along the way it's about conserving natural and cultural heritage. So the government is providing support money, which the community decides what projects to put it into. There are about 30 projects around Queensland, but three here that I just want to quickly focus on which show you the variety of areas that we are working with communities.
 The first one there, Lark Quarry; it's not really a quarry, and I don't know why it got that name. It's a fossil site, it's the site of a dinosaur stampede hundreds of millions of years ago, and it is the fossilization of those footprints that are now in the rock, and in fact, it's the best example of its type in the world, and it's way out in western Queensland. And for a long time there just wasn't the money or the impetus to not only protect those fossil footprints because they were deteriorating through weather and human impact, but it was also about getting the local community involved in working out the best way to protect and present those fossils. And they have received 2 million Australian dollars to help them build a facility to protect this important site.
 The second project concerns the small community of Chillagoe in Northern Queensland, which is regionally depressed. It used to have a strong mining history but the mines closed down many years ago, a lot of the people have left the town, it had become a bit like a ghost town, it really didn't have much of a future. But with working with that community and identifying the wonderful resources they had, they had mining history, they also have a great fossil history, they have some wonderful limestone caves, they have also got a marble industry there, big solid blocks of marble taken out of the ground, and also have a strong aboriginal history there. And by bringing those elements together we now have a community that is reinvigorated, that is very turned on by what they have in their community. They are now very proud of their community. And what this program, the Queensland Heritage Trials Network, has provided them with the money to develop the facilities. But the money is not enough in itself; there has to be that enthusiasm at the local level for it to happen. And we have been able to help that community reinvent itself very much from a tourism perspective, but to focus tourism on its cultural heritage.
 And the final example is a project that we are working in the wet tropics, in the rain forests of the wet tropics of North Queensland, where we are looking at linkages between natural heritage and cultural heritage, particularly rainforest aboriginal people. Very little is known about rainforest aboriginal people, and it is a project that it is looking at rainforests from a completely different perspective than traditional Australians would be aware of. And again, it's another program that is very much being run by the community, with assistance from government.
 So, ladies and gentlemen, I hope that gives you a bit of a background to what ecotourism is doing in Queensland. It is certainly a growing tourism product, and that's important obviously economically for our State. But even more importantly, ecotourism is providing the necessary leadership in terms of sustainable tourism, and I certainly believe that ecotourism can be the exemplar of ESD. Ecotourism can be the industry that will show all other industries around the world of what it means to be truly ecologically sustainable. And certainly I believe that ecotourism can lead the way for tourism-based community development, because through ecotourism we will see the representation of best practice tourism to the wider tourism industry. But even more than that, I believe that ecotourism can help foster community-based tourism development. And to me, the subtle difference between tourism -based community development, and community-based tourism development is that the former is tourism outcomes lead by industry while the latter is tourism led by the community. And again. I believe that ecotourism can be the form of tourism that local communities can embrace, and we have already heard that today in some of the other presentations, where local communities can put forward real tourism outcomes for their communities.
 So on that note, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much.








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