World's ecotourism promoters promise dollars, sense

With a crash through branches overhanging Borneo's Kinabatangan river, one of Malaysia's strangest wildlife attractions makes its dramatic entrance above a boatload of tourists.

The proboscis monkey, with its distinctive pendulous nose, long tail and orange and grey coat has arrived with his family troupe to find a spot to sleep in the canopy over the soupy, ochre water.

While the primates show no flicker of interest in their human audience, the tourists may be a key to the monkeys' future and that of countless other threatened species around the world.

Environmentalists, who have long regarded the travel business as a threat to nature, now see ecotourism as a potential saviour.

They hope a fraction of the $463 billion tourists spend around the world every year will help tip the economic scales in favour of saving forests for wildlife, instead of using them for logging, farming or mining.

For the proboscis monkeys, Asian elephants and other animals living along the Kinabatangan river, that could mean a halt to the oil palm plantations steadily encroaching into their territory.

Tourist dollars could also enrich local people and stem the flow of young people to towns and cities, a big problem for developing countries in Asia and elsewhere.

But even supporters of ecotourism see many hurdles ahead, not least defining what it actually is.

Fergus Tyler Maclaren, director at The International Ecotourism Society in Burlington, Vermont, says it does not mean hotels washing their towels less often or golf courses in the jungle.

He says ecotourism should protect wildlife habitats while making local people a living, something Asia sorely needs.

"Asia is still basically a very rural area which means a lot of poverty, a lot of people stuck on low wages with difficult lives," Maclaren said during a recent trip to an ecotourism conference in Malaysia's Sabah state on Borneo island.

"The communities that have taken it up realise that it's a really important opportunity for them to support their communities, support their jobs," he said.

Tor Hundloe, an academic who chairs Australia's National Ecotourism Accreditation Program, is part of a team drawing up a new world standard on ecotourism.

Hundloe sees opportunity in World Tourism Organisation forecasts of 1.6 billion tourists a year by 2020 - 20 per cent of humanity.

"If you can get enough of that fifth of humankind that's travelling to understand, you won't have to destroy vast areas of rainforest for people to be employed and to make an income."

That is where defining ecotourism comes in, he says. "It's got to be nature based. You might have a wonderful resort on a barrier reef or in some rainforest but if all people do is lie around and sip champagne, that's not ecotourism.

"Everything done, from the selection of the site to what is done in the bathroom, has got to be best practice in terms of saving energy, saving water, all those things.

"When you can prove that, you can have all the comfort, all the fine things you want," he said.

Maclaren says best practice should include regulation of tourist numbers to any site, a pressing issue for Sukau during the July-August high season.

"It's possible you can be loved to death by too many tourists going to a destination, where you are just too successful."

Some 10,000 people travel each year into Sukau, a village set near lakes and jungle on the Kinabatangan river.

Albert Teo, managing director and founder of Sabah's Borneo Eco Tours, says poor regulation leaves the narrow tributaries at Sukau clogged with boat traffic during peak periods.

Efforts at ecotourism can get swamped in the wake. "The tendency in the industry is to sell on price, price, price and most volume," said Teo, a former hotelier.

"I'm operating at a higher cost, with a smaller boat and paying a penalty for those who are not," says Teo, whose work has been praised by the local office of the World Wide Fund for Nature.

Teo employs villagers as guides and seeks to reduce the environmental impact of his lodge, conserving water and energy, and using electric boat motors to cut noise and air pollution.

Teo says another danger is that local people, typically fishermen, might grow hostile to tour operators and their clients unless efforts are made to ensure their approval.

"If local people perceive that there's no benefit to them, the way they receive visitors will be very negative," he said.