 My name is Jessie McComb and I'm a tourism specialist with the World Bank. And while I sit within a global team, I'm actually based in the US, so it's a bit late here and apologies for any delays on that side. So while I do sit within a global team, I have a regional focus on Asia Pacific, and I've been working with with the teams in the region, particularly in Southeast Asia. And I've spent a lot of time working in this region over the past decade or so. So my presentation will draw on my experiences working closely with communities and looking at developing tourism. And I will provide just a few best practices. I think the important thing to note is that there are many more lessons learned that hopefully we'll hear about today from all the rest of the presenters. So I'll just be able to provide a few. I think, are the slides still showing? Great, it's in the presenter's view. Oh, and you can just skip to the next slide. Great, excellent. So when approaching a new opportunity to develop ecotourism, we often see this process as a series of balancing acts. So the first is this delicate balance between the dual goals of conservation and business. Ecotourism development can be driven by conservation goals to address critical environmental or cultural issues. It can be supported as a means of economic opportunity for local communities or for livelihood generation. And it can also be a way for community empowerment and education. And of course it can be a combination of these things. So whatever the underlying goals are of developing a new ecotourism project, as we engage communities or as the development team engages communities, we need to carefully balance these these tourism and conservation goals to be successful communities require really a full understanding of the goals from the beginning of the project and ongoing education on why these goals are important and how ecotourism business development will help them achieve a better and more better way of life. The decision if and and how to engage in ecotourism also really needs to be one that the community makes for themselves. So it's a process of of education the process of communication, and then of self determination by the communities in terms of whether or not they they want to go ahead. So in the communities in which all of us work, people have an understanding of what development projects are developments around for a long time communities have engaged with a lot of NGOs. They often understand what a conservation project is. They often understand what a livelihood project is. You know, especially in Southeast Asia, they understand the tourism sector more broadly as well. However, there can often be a disconnect between how tourism and conservation can link together. The idea that tourists are interested and willing to pay for pristine nature based experiences. It's really critical to communicate. This is often often the new idea for communities. Additionally, within ecotourism development plans, a true alignment between the business goals of tourism. In other words, creating a financially viable and sustainable business must be balanced with the conservation goals. This is really the sweet spot that businesses need to be able to get to. The strong business focus needs to be built in from the start. This is where private sector engagement is necessary and critical. This is both in terms of assisting communities to hear what the market wants directly from the market and in developing a successful business with strong market linkages and mentorships with existing private sector entities. The other balancing act that we see in the initial stages of development is ensuring that communities understand, acknowledge and set allowable limits around community impact. This touches a little bit on what Sandra was talking about. Within communities and protected areas, tourism will have both positive and negative impacts. Supporting communities to identify what they envision might be these positive and negative impacts will help them to set expectations around overall tourism development or expansion. It will also help the community to prepare for potential challenges down the road and create self-driven mitigation measures. So these are things that they identify and they put in place themselves. One of the most common negative impacts that communities face within a new eco tourism development project might be a complex caused by unequal community benefits. If there are people in the community that feel that they are not benefiting from tourism, this can cause conflicts. Sometimes this results in a lack of support for the conservation initiatives of the project, going back to potentially damaging behavior. Sometimes this can result in sabotaging the business, sometimes harassing tourists, and in rare cases violence against each other or tourists. So setting these standards are really important from the beginning. And to prepare communities to deal with these challenges, it's essential that they have self-defined community structures. And this will help them resolve conflicts in the future. This will help them to distribute benefits more equally and to communicate the goals of the project to the wider community, not just the core team of people working on tourism. Sometimes these structures are already in place in the form of council of elders, tribal governments, associations, cooperatives, and a number of different mechanisms. And sometimes the project needs to develop these structures. In the latter case, development agencies, we need to ensure that this is then factored into the time frame of the project. And the team on ground has resources to conduct community governance strengthening activities, so not just the conservation activities or the business activities, but really about community engagement and community strengthening. Next slide, please. On the business side, ensuring that businesses will be financially feasible is really a critical element to any tourism or livelihood support. The foundation of tourism development should focus on taking a market driven approach and working closely with the private sector. There's also, I think, a need for communities to understand that as they launch a tourism business and eco tourism business or a cultural tourism business, that they are actually becoming part of the private sector and that they need to integrate into that supply chain. So this process starts by having an initial awareness of the products that the destination can offer, including both both nature based and cultural based experiences, and then conducting thorough market research to understand if tourists actually want to see these products if they're interested in them to understand what the willingness to pay is. To understand the types of broader experiences and services that need to be developed within a community or destination, as well as looking at supply chain linkages that might need to be strengthened or bolstered. So we know for market, existing market intelligence that that most eco tourism and nature based tourism consumers are interested in a wide range of activities, including both active and passive outdoor experiences, cultural exchanges, opportunities to meaningfully engage with communities, and of course culinary products. That's always the food experience is always very important. So ensuring that a range of services are developed is really critical to stimulating robust market demand in the future. The next step is ensuring that the businesses, these tourism products can be successfully transformed into financially viable businesses. Ensuring that there is sufficient demand revenue potential and supply chain support for sustainable business in the future. And then this needs to be linked to the conservation goals to do identify the business has sufficient demand to support both the business needs and the conservation needs to reach both of those goals in the project. This is often a tripping point for eco tourism development. And we need and we need to be prepared for the fact that sometimes eco tourism businesses are not feasible. And perhaps other livelihood options are more appropriate tourism is not always the answer to addressing a conservation need or to addressing a livelihood or economic empowerment need within a specific community. And occasionally does this does happen. I had an example of a project I supported a number of years ago, where there was high pressure to developing bird watching site in a very specific community. This area had very high biodiversity value being a bird nesting and breeding ground. However, the birds in this area were migratory European species, and the primary primary bird watching market in this destination were Europeans. Given the characteristics of bird watching market feedback from tour operators, it was determined that there was really low market potential for bird watching there. Essentially bird watchers were just not interested in seeing birds that they could see in their own backyards at home. So in this case, the research found the feasibility study found that there weren't sufficient tourism assets in this community to develop a tourism business. This is really an important thing to establish at the beginning of a process. Otherwise, false expectations can be set with communities and their thoughts about what can happen in the future might be misaligned. However, in most cases, when the business is feasible, the hard work of going back to the community to create the business really begins. And this includes script and itinerary development, business plan creation, lots and lots and lots of training on everything from guiding and first stage to financial management to really help the community to manage a professional tourism business. And the way to support this complicated process is really by gathering a mix of expertise, including community engagement, business development, tourism, marketing, conservation experts. And by bringing together a team that views ecotourism through these different lenses from the beginning of the project, communities can really benefit in the long term. Next slide. So I'll leave you with a few resources from the World Bank. This will be supplemented by my colleague Werner during his presentation later for he has a couple of more regionally specific resources. And I think the important thing to remember is that there are people and resources out there to support successful ecotourism development. We'll hear from many of them today in the speaker list. We have a lot of really great expertise in the virtual room so to speak. And we are here to support your projects and development goals through providing this type of expertise. Next slide please. So unfortunately, given the time zone I will not be able to stay for the full meeting and the discussion, but please do reach out to me via email if you have any questions. And I hope you have a wonderful rest of the session in symposium. Thank you very much.