JIR Special Issue Editorial Draft January 2023

Abstract

Tourism often involves activities that have the potential to create significant changes to natural and built environments. Where tourists go, what they do, and how they do it can contribute to problems such as erosion, damage to vegetation, habitat destruction, wildlife disturbance, impacts to other visitors and local communities, and various forms of pollution. Careful management is needed to ensure the conservation values and goals of tourist sites and protected areas are not compromised by human activity. Interpretation, which is defined as “a purposeful approach to communication that facilitates meaningful, relevant, and inclusive experiences that deepen understanding, broaden perspectives, and inspire engagement with the world around us” (NAI, 2021), is key to achieving this. Accordingly, this special issue seeks to examine the role of interpretation in the sustainable management of tourists in a variety of natural settings. The use of interpretation to manage tourism impacts is becoming increasingly challenging. Before the COVID19 pandemic, tourism was a significant feature of human mobility with more than 1.3 billion people engaging in international tourism globally, nearly double the number from 5 years earlier. In many locations, there was also a significant growth in domestic tourism, with over 9 billion overnight domestic tourist trips reported in 2018 (UNWTO, 2018, 2021). Once pandemic travel restrictions eased, there was a significant increase in visitation to natural areas. This trend has been attributed to people seeing nature-based tourism experiences as restorative, safe, and more desirable than urban-based activities (Bott, 2020). As international travel resumes, the trend toward visiting natural areas appears to be continuing (Kupfer et al., 2021). Natural areas are not only facing considerable pressure from increased numbers of tourists, they are also catering to increasingly diverse cohorts of tourists. Globally, the