The Tourism Industry and the Marine Environment

Throughout this book we have been looking, primarily, at the negative impacts of tourism on the marine environment. It would appear reasonable to lay the blame for this at the door of the tourism industry, which facilitates the vacations that cause this harm and makes money from exploiting the marine environment and the other natural resources of tourist destinations around the world. However, things are not always that simple, as we will see in this chapter. For in tourism, and certainly land-based tourism, it has often been the tourism industry itself, and particularly the tour operation sector, which has often been leading the way on responsible tourism, often with little encouragement from the tourists themselves and usually no government regulation forcing them to act. Their motives may not have been altruistic but, nevertheless, they have taken action on a number of fronts, while events like the Responsible Tourism Days at World Travel Market in London have sought to share good practice around the tourism industry.