Community-Based Mountain Tourism: Practices for Linking Conservation with Enterprise

Mountains have become a magnet for tourism, which is the most rapidly growing industry in the world. Massive increases of tourist activity in fragile mountain ecosystems pose a serious challenge in the developed world, and an even more daunting one in developing nations. How can mountain tourism be managed so as to avoid and minimize adverse environmental impacts? How can local communities receive an equitable share of the benefits from such tourism? Indeed, how can they interact with large numbers of tourists without destroying their own culture in the process?