Oral Presentation: Proactively Managing Diversification of Antarctic Tourism

Description

Tourism in Antarctica has experienced exponential growth in recent years. Better access to the continent and compounding factors of growing international awareness of the region’s varied icescapes, landscapes and fauna, along with rising global affluence and easing of international travel, have resulted in a recent substantial increase in the number of visitors and concomitantly increase in the diversity of tourism activities on the continent and its surrounding waters. The tourism offers have expanded from sight-seeing cruises and small boat trips with short landings to a diverse range of on-land activities, including marathons, mountain climbing, base-jumping, motorized expeditions, and heli-skiing, along with the ever more invasive incisions of the traditional sightseeing and wildlife experience tourism. This research focuses on tourism and tourism diversification in Antarctica through a project on proactive management of Antarctic tourism funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO). Antarctica has a unique tourism setting regarding the absence of an indigenous population, a complex international governance system and regulatory framework, and a voluntary self-regulated tourism body. Apart from the challenge of defining what counts as tourism in Antarctica, the difficulty of conceptualizing a comprehensive tourism management approach for the continent prevails. This presentation, therefore, reviews tourism practices and management in the Arctic and other wilderness areas in order to offer insights on diversification trends and governance strategies for Antarctic tourism. Moreover, the research intends to frame tourism and diversification in Antarctica, giving special attention to the values and principles of the Antarctic Treaty System and how they (should) receive recognition in tourism on the continent. It claims that tourism in Antarctica could benefit from moving away from the dominant ‘economic growth paradigm’ animating tourism industry development discourse and practices in order to prevent possible disastrous future tourism scenarios.

Period	10 Apr 2022
Event title	7th IPTRN Conference and Study Tour: Polar Tourism and Communities of Practice: experiences, knowledge building, challenges and opportunities.
Event type	Conference/symposium
Location	Ushuaia, ArgentinaShow on map