Linking conservation and communities: community benefits and social costs

A significant contribution to ecotourism’s global following has been its potential to deliver benefits to communities remote from centres of commerce, benefits that do not involve widespread social or environmental destruction. Too often in the past the only opportunities for many communities remote from urban centres, particularly in the developing world, were provided by extractive industries – mining, logging, or fishing – which had massive impacts on local communities and often left an unacceptable legacy of long-term environmental damage.