I just posted about this on [email protected], but anyone who cares about NZ wildlife, tourism or climate change should have their say on this.
MBIE’s Tourism Environment Leadership Group has developed a Draft Tourism Environment Action Plan. They say:
The draft action plan aims to ensure tourism has a positive impact on the natural environment and proposes 6 focus areas to achieve this. These areas or Tirohanga Hou (new pathways) are:
- Tourism journeys are decarbonised
- Tourism champions biodiversity
- Visitor management is optimised for te taiao (nature)
- Accelerated technology uptake and innovation enable regeneration
- Tourism businesses are incentivised and enabled for sustainability and regeneration
- The tourism system and its levers are optimised and resourced to support regeneration
Each area has multiple actions that will deliver positives not only for the environment but for communities and tourism operations.
Some actions see the tourism industry working with communities to create a picture of what healthy visitation looks like. Others focus on supporting and incentivising tourism operators to adopt sustainable or regenerative practices. Rapid investment in low-carbon technologies for long-haul travel is another key action.
You can take their survey here. It’s anonymous and took me about 10 minutes. The full plan and info about how else to make submissions is here.
There’s an RNZ article about this, but they mostly focus on “sustainable airline fuels”.