As Dr Dolnicar points out,
although tourists generally care about the environment and do not wish to harm
it, the fact is that, when referring to environmentally
sustainable behavior, a
positive attitude does not always lead to environmentally sustainable
holiday choices. For example, many of the
Eco-tourists choose hotels that talking about reducing waste by using recycled
toilet paper and low flow showerheads, but, nature of them as mega hotels makes
it impossible for them to be truly environmental-friendly. Also, some of
the eco-tourists say that they can offset carbon emissions with Qantas but, if they really want to
reduce the footprint, they wouldn’t fly.
Sadly to say, the truth is that, by
every travelling we go, we contribute a little to environmental pollution or
climate change. Here is a video talking about eco-tourists' impact on Tiger
Shark movement and behavior. Eco-tours market themselves as a low negative
impact, environmental and community friendly way to see the world. We just
want to ask, are they really eco-friendly?
A study conducted by Juvan and Dolnicar
(2014) showed that, overall, all the participants were acutely aware of the
potentially negative impacts of tourism on the environment. The sample of the
study was selected to consist of people who expressed pro-environmental
cognitions in the interviews – that were expected to have the smallest
attitude–behavior gap. However, there still existed an
attitude–behavior gap among these environmental activists. These participants
explained for the gap:
“If
you want to take the train, that will take more time, and you have to have more
time (unprompted, female, 33 years old).”
“Hotels
don’t have recycling facilities (prompted, female, 29 years old). ”
“I
convince myself I will compensate somewhere else and that no one is perfect (unprompted,
male, 26 years old). ”
…
Juvan and Dolnicar (2014) divided these
explanations for the attitude–behavior gap into 6 groups:
Even for those environmental activists, the
attitude-behavior gap is obvious. How about the others? We can
estimate that there would be so many people who were aware of the fact
that their tourism-related behavior is not aligned with their pro-environmental
attitudes. What should we do reduce the gap? Can we really achieve
eco-tourism? These are so many questions we should think about. It is a co-creation process,
we do need both tourists and those travel organizations to work together to
close the GAP.
We do believe that eco-tourism is here to
stay and is for sure a good thing!! However, in order to gain a greater impact,
there needs to be a focus not only on “using less water” but also on
sustainable, local initiatives that help businesses grow with the environment.
Reference:
Juvan, Emil and Dolnicar, Sara (2014) The
attitude-behaviour gap in sustainable tourism. Annals of Tourism Research, 48 76-95.
doi:10.1016/j.annals.2014.05.012
