Resumen de Nature-based Solutions: complementing ecotourism’s conservation, sustainability, and economic objectives
Anna Phelan, Jamie Murphy, Leonie Bowles
Ecotourism and natural resource conservation is generallyregarded as a mutually beneficial relationship. However, a recurringchallenge is to implement ecotourism that contributes to local ecosystem socio-ecological sustainability and, as such, developing and maintaining ecotourism operations that meet economic and sustainability expectations has proven difficult. Against such a conundrum, this conceptual paper draws on a recent and evolving concept—Nature-based Solutions (NbS)—to posit how an NbS lens can implement ecotourism principles to enhance economic outcomes, conservation, and sustainability. The mapping in this paper extends the NbS framework to ecotourism and highlights synergies, opportunities and deficiencies in current ecotourismapproaches. We present a conceptual framework, drawing from existing literature, that incorporates NbS and ecotourism principles. Implementing this framework can help ecotourism businesses better align purpose and profit, and attenuate ecotourism’s conflicting conservation, sustainability, and economic objectives
