The tourism industry is grappling with an existential question: how can it continue in the face of damaging over-tourism and the threat of climate change?
Organisations from places as diverse as the Brazilian Amazon and the National Forest in the UK have found the path forward has a common thread: people.
That’s not to say that, for these precious natural resources, people aren’t the problem in the first place. In the Amazon, clear-felling for cattle and soybeans and illegal mining for precious metals has reduced the size of the rainforest by a fifth. And in some ways, the relatively small patch of land that now makes up the National Forest in the middle of England warns us of what the Amazon could become. Decades of coal, clay and gravel extraction had left behind a blackened landscape and an absence of jobs after industries collapsed.
But thanks to some creative thinking, nine million trees have been planted over the last 30 years across an area of 200 square miles, creating habitats for wildlife to thrive and attracting between eight and nine million visitors every year – an unthinkable number when the project began.
Replicating that success on the other side of the world is a
