Managing Tanzanian Nature-Based Tourism under climate change

Summary

With respect to nature-based tourism (NBT), the impact of environmental change not only changes the types and distributions of tourist attractions but also interfere with tourists’ comfort and safety. Nonetheless, assessments of these impacts are inadequate either for specific tourist attractions or for tourism destinations. A major knowledge gap is that tourist attractions are poorly defined in coarse categories, such as ‘wildlife’, without details on types or species, and knowledge on how individual attractions are rooted in their supporting environments is inadequate. My thesis fills this knowledge gap. My thesis develops a new and generic approach referred as ‘eco-parcel approach’ that describes tourist attractions into unambiguous categories, links each attraction with its supporting environments and assesses how individual tourist attractions react to climate and land cover change for the key Tanzanian NBT destinations case studies: Serengeti and Kilimanjaro National Parks.