Managing impacts of tourism on biodiversity

Tourism has become one of the largest economic activities in the world. The rapid growth in tourism has produced more infrastructure, increased pollution, put unsustainable demands on local environments, and created adverse impacts on biodiversity. In many coastal areas, for example, strings of high-rise hotels stretch for kilometres along beaches that not long ago might have been diverse habitats of coastal forest, mangroves, seagrass beds and coral reefs. The big challenges in minimising the impact of "mass tourism" on biodiversity lie with prob-lems such a sewage treatment in coastal areas, site selection of hotels, pollution caused by large fleets of tour buses, impacts of scuba divers, and environmental issues posed by golf courses, waste treatment of big resort hotels, etc.