OVERTOURISM
The southern part of Kruger National Park is packed full of wildlife, which is a shame. To make things worse, for some reason (or maybe as a result of clever planning) all this wildlife seems to like to hang out on the H3, the main tarred road between Malelane Gate and Skukuza. This is extremely unfortunate because the south of the park is arguably the most accessible and a tarred road means that anyone and everyone can drive on it. We saw the worst of this on a trip to Kruger earlier this year. We were driving along the H3 after a night at Berg-en-Dal campsite and saw a mass of vehicles stopped up further on the road. What would normally cause great excitement led my stomach to sink because I knew exactly what was coming.
Have a look at the picture on the left, a beautiful lion walking along the road, with no zoom. Now have a look at the picture on the right. This is the reality behind that beautiful image.
The lion in that photo was being herded by vehicles, filled with guests, cameras at the ready, pushing to get that perfect shot of the beautiful creature. Most of the vehicles were driven by guides who were motivated by the thought that if they got to show their guests a member of the Big 5 they might get a better tip which would convert their wage in to one that they could actually survive off.
Overtourism is a classic case of protected areas becoming a victim of their own success. Having been defined for all tourism, this phenomenon is considered as the congestion of tourists leading to conflict with locals. If we take this down to nature based tourism it can be considered as the conflict with wildlife and entire ecosystems. Indeed, local communities still have to be considered as, despite what colonial conservation has tried to convince us of, there are communities which live in and around protected areas.
But conflict with ecosystems in particular can lead to environmental degradation and stressed animals which leads to negative impacts on reproduction, lower recruitment which leads to even lower reproduction. One doesn’t have to be an academic scholar to realise that if left unchecked this could lead to significant losses in wildlife populations and potentially even extinctions. And thus the loss of the whole base upon which the tourism industry is built.
As I mentioned, this is a classic case of a protected area becoming a victim of its own success. Much like Kruger National Park, the Masai Mara and the Serengeti have developed a cult like status with them being one of the most requested destinations by European and American tourists. Trust me, I worked in a tourism company for a few months, its honestly like no other protected areas exist. Within these parks there have been many reports of vehicles chasing and harassing wildlife, much like I have seen personally far too many times in Kruger National Park. Unfortunately this all comes down to money. Something which not many guests are aware of is the fact that most guides are paid a very very low salary, with the expectation (but, importantly, not guarantee) that their salary will be supplemented by tips from guests. Guests are rarely told this and the tips are left entirely up to their discretion. Guides then feel the need to fulfil the guest’s wildlife sightings requests in the hope that by doing so they will receive enough money to live off. And so the unsustainable tourism cycle is created. This needs to change. It its horrifying to think that in a very mid-range lodge, what a guest would pay for a single night will cover 2-3 guides’ salaries for an entire month. You can’t blame the guides for doing this, but something in the system need to change so that conservation, rather than chasing down sightings, is prioritised. The speeding-to-sightings which is all too common in the bush is leading to stressed out animals and in some horrific cases the killing of animals.
The impact of this behaviour has also been shown to come down to the individual species level. Broekhuis (you can find the details of her paper at the end of this post) found that cheetah cub recruitment in the Masai Mara was significantly lower in areas that are heavily frequented by tourists compared to those less frequented sites. So it’s not too far fetched to think that the reducing wildlife populations which we are seeing in many protected areas is linked to overtourism.
FEMALE CHEETAHS THAT WERE EXPOSED TO HIGH TOURIST ABUNDANCE ON AVERAGE RAISED 0.21 ± 0.72 CUBS TO INDEPENDENCE COMPARED TO 2.32 ± 0.11 CUBS IN LOW TOURISM AREAS
Broekhuis, 2018
This ultimately confirms in our minds that nature based tourism in its current state in many protected areas is unsustainable. And will eventually destroy the very thing that it is built upon. It is also an argument for Botswana’s high value low impact tourism model which, despite pricing most people out of the market, has done great things to protect its wildlife, while providing an income and reducing the incidence of overtourism massively
We’re simply talking about the effect of tourists going on a game drive in a protected area. We’ve not even covered the effect of developing lodges and hotels in protected areas to accommodate all the tourists which visit the area.
So for us, over tourism is one of the greatest threats to biodiversity conservation and sustainable nature based tourism. But we are at a key time to mitigate this threat and if we’re going to do so, the effort needs to come from all sides.
Reserve managers need to start setting limits on the number of tourists who can enter a protected area each day. They also need to implement wildlife viewing rules which are strictly adhered to. These rules should include maintaining a particular distance from an animal on a sighting, limiting the number of vehicles which can be on any one sighting at a time, not herding the animal, not parking between a juvenile and its mother and not affecting the animal when it is hunting or any such behaviour to impact its activity.
Guides need to adhere to these rules and understand that they have the greatest influence on guests and play the most important role in educating them on the best behaviours. If these rules are not adhered to then the guide responsible for breaking the rules should immediately have their guiding licence removed and they shall not be allowed to return to the park in a guiding capacity of any kind.
And guests need to ensure that they manage their expectations and that they are not being unreasonable in their requests. They need to practice patience in waiting to view an animal and not encourage or worse bribe their guide to push unnecessarily and break the rules to view an animal. They need to appreciate the environment which they are in as a whole and aim to learn in a holistic manner about the environment rather than have a check list of animals which they would like to take a selfie with.
If all parties put in a significant amount of effort together then change can take place. Then overtourism will not take place and we will not see a decline in the environments on which an entire industry is built. Sustainable nature-based tourism can play a key role in the future of southern African biodiversity conservation and it is our mission here at Thatch and Earth to ensure that it is the route southern African tourism ends up taking.