8. Challenges in Sustainable Wildlife Tourism

This chapter emphasizes the challenges facing wildlife tourism from local to global contexts. Just like other forms of tourism, wildlife tourism is not free from obstacles. Some of the constant challenges facing wildlife tourism include engagement among communities, global crises, conserving biodiversity in the era of commercial poaching and human–wildlife conflicts, and climate change and variability. Insufficient local and international cooperation from various wildlife tourism stakeholders is one of the challenges that make wildlife tourism fail to balance between ecological integrity, social equality, and economic viability, which is essential in achieving sustainable and responsible tourism in destinations with limited resources. The concept of sustainable wildlife tourism can be challenging to execute, even with the aid of open sustainability certification programs, suitable technologies, laws, and regulations that support without proper support from tourism stakeholders. Wildlife destinations experience many challenges during species conservation; mitigating human-wildlife conflicts is still challenging because of the increasing human population and climate change. Insufficient sectoral and international technical, logistical, and financial support for addressing the negative impacts of commercial poaching and wildlife trafficking are anticipated to adversely affect wildlife tourism in the near future. Climate change and unpredictability challenge wildlife tourism due to their continual harmful impacts on wildlife habitats and behaviors. Climate change through extreme rainfall and cyclones may harm tourist infrastructure and superstructure in particular destinations. By altering ecosystems and tourism infrastructure, climate change makes the execution of sustainable principles even more difficult and amplifies the costs for infrastructural recovery and adaptive management. As one of the global crises, the COVID-19 outbreak demonstrates the way wildlife tourism could be affected by the global crisis. During the COVID-19 era, wildlife tourism took place on a limited scale and cautiously to prevent the future transmission of the diseases. This underscores the requirements of employing virtual tourism technologies and the adoption of market diversification techniques to promote sustainable and responsible wildlife tourism. Thailand and Bhutan exemplify the ways conservation, socioeconomic growth, and cultural preservation may be linked and integrated into sustainable tourism frameworks to attain the high-value, low-impact tourist model.