ABSTRACT
Surprisingly, issues related to the systematic development of tourism activity in rainforest areas have been largely ignored in the tourism literature, although it is true that there are a growing number of papers that examine a range of tourism-related issues where the setting happens to be a forest. In one sense, this book builds on Font and Tribe’s (2000) book that examined issues related to forest tourism, recreation and environmental management but directs the reader’s attention to a wider range of issues associated with rainforests. Essentially this book is an attempt to redress, in a small way, the many gaps in knowledge that currently surround tourism in these wonderful, but in many areas, threatened, ecosystems. To undertake this task, a large team of authors has been assembled to examine rainforest issues using a thematic approach. Many of the authors are from the countries they have examined, giving the book a unique quality. This chapter introduces the need for a systematic study of factors related to understanding opportunities for tourism development in rainforests, builds a model to assist this process and applies this model to a case study based on the Wet Tropics Queensland World Heritage Area (WTQWHA), Australia.
