 Hi there. Welcome to Tourism Matters, a program that explores issues about tourism and why tourism is an important part of our lives. This is brought to you by UPAIT and TVUP. Tourism Matters tackle broad topics and are divided into three series. Number one, tourism policy and governance with a specific focus on issue on over-tourism. Number two, tourism education and human resource capacity. And number three, tourism industry, market and enterprise. We hope you find the series interesting, educational and fun. In this series, leading experts in tourism share their thoughts on over-tourism, a term that first appeared on social media in 2012 to denote the negative impacts of tourism and the social movements associated with host antagonism to too many guests. Over-tourism has come to mean the dark side of tourism, overcrowding, pollution and social exclusion. In this episode, we invited environmental planner, attorney Mark Evidente, lecturers from the University of the Philippines to share his thoughts on how to mitigate against the negative impacts of tourism and make it more sustainable and inclusive. I'm Mark Richard Evidente. I'm an environmental planner and lawyer and president of 2ECO, Incorporated Sustainability Consultants. When we talk about over-tourism, we're not just talking about the numbers of tourists. We're talking about their impact and we're talking about their impact on the environment, on infrastructure and on the community. When we talk about the environment, we see the impact of tourists in terms of how they interfere with the environment or what they draw from the environment. For instance, if it's a sensitive area like a forest or a natural park, a tourist can actually enter the area and have very little impact on it. They can also enter and have a lot of impact and then that would be a situation of over-tourism. Second one would be about the infrastructure. We can have a lot of tourists and then there's no sufficient infrastructure in terms of water, power and sewage. What happens is that they draw too much water or they produce too much sewage that it's not processed by the natural environment in a proper way. There's a need for infrastructure in that case that needs to be upgraded. When you talk about community, of course there's a host community that's affected by tourism. Does the community benefit from the tourists that enter or are they inconvenienced or put at a disadvantage because of tourism? These are the kinds of things that we have to think about when we talk about the idea of over-tourism. As I said earlier, it's not just about too many tourists but about their impact. There is an aspect about numbers and impact. The second aspect is that it is also about lack of planning and poor destination management because even if you have a lot of plans and well-made plans of that, but if there are simply too many tourists that arrive in a particular area, then you do have over-tourism. Of course it's also the situation in which you don't have plans and you don't have destination management. Any number of tourists really stretch the ability of the environment, the community, and the infrastructure to deal with over-tourism. Yes, people were aware about over-tourism, but I think for a long time the understanding of tourism was mainly from an economic point of view in terms of what jobs it would generate or what income would be generated for a community or a locality. I think one of the things that came up with this administration was that there is a shift towards looking at tourism in a more holistic sense. Although the idea of sustainable tourism has been there, at least officially as a policy statement, as early as 2009 with the enactment of the tourism act of 2009. But I think over the last decade, this administration has led the shift towards sustainability. Of course this is early in the process of moving towards sustainability, but it's good to see government leading the charge and it would be good also to see more conversations between government and the academe and other stakeholders on truly coming up with a good formula for sustainability for our country. I think being proactive really starts with having a plan and the plan is not simply about having or identifying the infrastructure that needs to be built or what kinds of designs it needs to look at. We need to have a plan that really looks at the problem in a holistic way, that it deals with the community, it brings and creates a regular forum for the community to interact with other decision makers and so they can regularly have a conversation about whether the community or the locality is now reaching a point of over-tourism and it's not simply about also the community and decision makers. You also need to bring in experts. You need to bring in scientists, for example, to measure the impact on the environment. You need to bring in engineers and architects and urban planners to talk about and examine whether the infrastructure needs to be enhanced or upgraded to deal with tourism development. The two concepts, carrying capacity and over-tourism, are related in the sense that carrying capacity provides us an indicator whether a place has reached a point of over-tourism. It's crucial that the destination needs to have a plan. We cannot deal with tourism on an organic or an evolutionary way. We can't just respond to the needs because in one year you'll have hundreds of thousands of people or maybe even millions of visitors arriving in a particular area and a town or a city cannot simply adapt to that in an organic fashion. There has to be a plan and the plan starts if we talk about the different elements of over-tourism. First let's talk about impact. What kind of strategies can we put in place so that tourists can reduce their impact? One simple thing can be like limiting the use of plastics, limiting the use of disposable single-use plastics and other items. So that reduces the impact of waste and trash in the environment. Also tourists can learn to use less of water or use less of other resources in a particular area. So one is impact. The second is the environment. In managing the impact on the environment zoning is crucial. We need to identify areas where people are allowed and what activities people can do in a particular area. But as they enter deeper into a particular environment or a particular cultural area we need to also find out or limit the level in which people interact with that environment because that would seriously impact on the natural condition or the cultural significance of a particular site. So in terms of infrastructure then that needs to be planned, that needs to be forecasted and designed ahead of the tourists arriving. So if a particular locality is seeing so many thousands of tourists arriving in a particular year then you need to start upgrading the number of hotels, the kind of sewage system that they have, the kind of water system that they have. It has to be done in an organized and rational manner. And if we talk about the community, how can we ensure that the community is properly engaged in tourism? Does the community benefit in a concrete way, like are jobs really generated for the community? Or are they simply the background to all this development that's going on? Or is the community regularly consulted on new projects that are undertaken by the local government or by investors? So if we think about tourism, there are very concrete steps that we can do in terms of impact, environment, infrastructure, and community. Of course other localities have gone as far as limiting the number of people that enter a particular area by introducing permits or another is applying fees that only certain people who pay the fees can enter a particular area. And all these help minimize impact. In a lot of places in which fees are collected, those fees go in turn to go and in turn help in managing the environmental impact in a particular site. So there are a lot of measures that the destination can take and it begins really with planning and it leads to regulation and enforcement. Definitely the government and industry themselves, you know, it should really work, they should work hand in hand to promote responsible business practices. I think if we really think about the two things that we have, the two urgent needs in our country that we have, one is the need of course to develop. And then the second is the seriousness of climate change and other environmental problems. There is really no other choice but for government and business to work together in order to come up with responsible business practices for the community and for the environment. I think the seriousness of climate change, for instance, if we really think about it, we really need to buckle down and address these problems within the next five to ten years. A lot of countries are aiming to be zero or rather carbon neutral by 2040 or 2050. How far are we along that path? Because there can be no future unless it's a future that's sustainable. To improve a community's quality of life, one of the things that tourism must do, whether from government or the private sector, is to make sure that a host community really benefits from tourism. The first thing really is that to make sure that most of the jobs generated by tourism really go to locals of the community. So at least that reduces the possibility or the tendency of people to migrate from outside of the community and further stress the infrastructure or the community's own ability to cope with outsiders. And then second is that tourism can find ways, in fact, of respecting the local community's identity. So if we're talking about a particular locality that has a particular product or particular cultural practices, then that can in fact be enhanced and integrated into tourism activities. So at least even the community starts being more proud about their identity or more and they start to cherish their own cultural or social identity more from these things. So these are just two quick things that need to be done and these are things that are readily implementable. Episode 3 clarified that over tourism is not simply a tourism only problem. Community participation, respect for and preservation of local culture, planning, managing visitor impacts and observing physical caring capacity hold the key to a more sustainable tourism development.