GREAT PLAINS CONSERVATION
Google ‘Sustainable Tourism Africa’ and you come up with 5,220,000 results. It’s big news and it’s big business. And now that the UN has declared 2017 as the Year of Sustainable Tourism for Development, it just got a whole lot bigger. The trick for both the industry and the travelling public is to be able to sort the wheat from the chaff, and that isn’t easy, even for those who know their way around the subject.
In fact, over the past 10 years Africa, probably more than anywhere else in the world, has embraced sustainable tourism. A decade ago, tourism was second only to mining as the continent’s most extractive industry. Now, country after country has embraced eco-friendly practices and there is evidence everywhere of reform.