Sustainable tourism: Sustaining biodiversity?

New markets for ecosystem services have emerged in response to the failure of traditional biodiversity conservation mechanisms to effectively protect and conserve the processes that support ecosystem function and process (Landell-Mills and Porras, 2002; Pagiola et al., 2002). Sustainable tourism-one market tool that potentially supports biodiversity services-aims to balance the environmental, economic, and socio-cultural features of tourism development by maintaining environmental resources, the socio-cultural livelihoods of host communities, and providing stakeholder benefits (WTO, 2004). Proponents claim that sustainable tourism contributes toward maintaining biodiversity, while critics fear that marketing various components of biodiversity as distinct services (e.g., only protecting unique places for sustainable tourism, and only protecting extremely biodiverse places for bioprospecting), fails to protect the integrity of the functioning, and dynamic ecosystem (Landell-Mills and Porras, 2002). This chapter serves as one section of a four-part analysis of existing and emerging markets for biodiversity services using Panama as a case study. Based on projections of future sustainable tourism markets, this analysis presents policy options that could positively augment future sustainable tourism ventures. © 2007 The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.