Home / Life
The eco-tourism trips offered by the likes of Beijing-based tour company EcoAction can educate travelers while creating sustainable economic growth in protected areas
Mass tourism has always been the dominant force in the country's tourism sector. It is so dominant that you can hardly find a real eco-tourism product on the market.
Very few tour operators are willing or able to tap into the niche market because ecotourism involves visiting fragile, pristine, and relatively undisturbed natural areas, is intended as a low-impact and often small-scale alternative to standard mass tourism, and needs leaders with expertise on conservation to design and guide a tour, and therefore, are usually much more expensive.
A tiny tour company in Beijing called EcoAction is one of the few, and so far, its major products, featuring scientific expeditions and nature education tours in the country's national nature reserves, can all be considered as fine examples of eco-tourism.
A tour billed "All about Asian Elephant" leads participants, mainly students and their parents, to Asian elephant habitats in Xishuangbanna, Yunnan province. At different sites, including Wild Elephant Valley, Mengyuan Tropical Forest under the Xishuangbanna National Nature Reserve, and Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, they can engage scientists, conservationists, local rangers and villagers, and learn about the endangered animal's living status and environment, the threats to their survival in the wild, and the conflicts between human and elephants.
Another tour features giant pandas and their habitat in Sichuan province. Participants can become volunteers to have closer contact with giant pandas at the Bifengxia Giant Panda Breeding Center in Ya'an and explore the Liziping National Nature Reserve by staying in a research station and monitoring the animals with scientists and rangers.
Yet another takes its customers to the Yinggeling National Nature Reserve in Hainan province to learn the rich biodiversity of tropical forest and its conservation.
"The three are our major long-range products," says Luo Peng, founder of the company which was established in 2013. "They all feature the rare chance of staying in a national nature reserve, and learning about an endangered species or a unique ecosystem from researchers and rangers, and communicate with local villagers."
"It is real eco-tourism we are implementing, and hopefully it will set an ethical example," the company's website writes about the company.
"China has world-class biodiversity. And the great thing is there need not be any conflict between the economy and the environment. At the moment, there is not enough consideration of the environment in economic decision-making. That is largely because there is little about the environment in the national curriculum," Terry Townshend, a part-time tour leader and director of the company, explains why he joined EcoAction in 2014 in an e-mail to China Daily.
"So the work of organizations like EcoAction is critical to fill that gap and give young people a sense of pride in their environment and its amazing biodiversity, and an optimism about the future that China can have strong and sustainable economic growth whilst protecting its environment and conserving its biodiversity."
Sustainable
Luo tells China Daily in a caf�� in Beijing that the real ecotourism should be a good way for development in the country's protected areas. "But only commercial success can guarantee that it is sustainable," she says.
Luo, 32, had gained the insight into nature and conservation through her academic studies and involvement in several projects, and made up her mind to pursue a career in the niche business.
She studied biology at the prestigious Beijing Normal University in 2002 and became a nature lover through her biological fieldworks. After graduation in 2006, she pursued her master's degree with professor Sun Yuehua, a leading Chinese ornithologist, in the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and studied a species of finch in the Lianhuashan National Nature Reserve in Gansu province.
Before her graduation in 2009, she helped organizing the Society for Conservation Biology's International Congress for Conservation Biology, the most important international meeting for conservation professionals and students, in Beijing. Professor Sun was secretary general of the meeting's organizing committee.
"It was the first time the meeting being held in China and so there was a lot of organizing work to do," Luo says. "While designing and arranging field trips for participants of the meeting, I found I was pretty good at coordinating and organizing things."
After graduation, she started working with a local grassroots NGO in Beijing as an environmental education officer.
In 2011, she designed an eco-tourism project for environmental education to take part in a social innovation competition that was organized by a Chinese airline. Her project was one of 10 chosen for the final round of the competition.
In the following year, she started organizing eco-tours in Beijing. "It was not for profit, but a kind of nature education familiarization tour for children and their parents," the Sichuan native says.
She charged 100 yuan ($16) per person for a group of about 20 participants. A typical outing would feature a tour of the Beijing Botanical Garden, with PhD students of botany teaching participants how to identify some plants in the mornings, and participants learning botanical photography, painting or handwork in different groups in the afternoons.
"The fees were used to hire teachers," she points out. "My alumni from both the university and the academy are good resources."
Many of her alumni have been involved in conservation and research work in the country's nature reserves, she says. Some work with nature reserves, some with international conservation NGOs, such as International Fund for Animal Welfare and Kadoorie Conservation China, and others are doing research in the reserves.
She cooperated with IFAW to design the Asian elephant tour and with Kadoorie for the Hainan tour.
"I knew that our reserve managers had been looking for responsible visitors to come and create some reliable sources of income for the local communities and many researchers also expected to share their understanding of our nature with the public," Luo says. "So I had the resources and capacity to develop some distinctive eco-tourism products."
Hiking
She believes her company's products should target middle school students, especially those from international schools and best aged around 15.
"Our week-long tours usually feature hiking and staying in nature reserves. So it's better for participating students to be able to travel independently," she says. "Fifteen is usually the age that a child has enough confidence to travel alone. We specifically tailor our tours for them, because we found that when children travel with their parents, they often become less responsible and reluctant to explore the unknown."
Compared with students from public schools who can only travel in their summer and winter vacations, students from international schools have more freedom to join a nature experience tour. "International schools usually pay more attention to nurture children's interest to nature."
Not cheap
A typical product, such as the elephant tour or the giant panda tour, is a 7-9 day package with 15 participants and charges about 9,000 yuan per person, not including air fares.
"Our tours are not cheap, because we need to pay for experts' lectures and guiding services and we will also give back part of the income to the local communities," Luo says.
For example, the company pays more than 20,000 yuan to the head of Daoying village within the Yinggeling National Nature Reserve. The village head arranges for villagers to participate in the tour, some as motorcycle drivers, others as tour guides, some to cook for the group and others to provide free boarding to the visitors.
"After paying for these people's services, we ask the village head to use the surplus to improve the village's infrastructure and make public how the funds have been used to other villagers."
In Beijing, EcoAction promotes one-day nature education excursion among the city's schools and its star product is the bird watching tour.
Townshend, a native Englishman living in Beijing, is the tour leader. Townshend is a bird watcher with birding experience of more than 30 years and started a blog called "Birding Beijing" since he came to the city in 2010. He has spearheaded efforts to save some of China's most endangered birds. In 2012 the 44-year-old became a Species Champion with BirdLife International.
Besides guiding the birding tour, he led the Hainan tour in early this year together with Luo Peng and gave free lectures about bird watching in schools in Beijing. "Speaking to Chinese children, I hope to inspire them to develop a lifelong interest in nature. They are tomorrow's decision-makers and if the natural world is deeply-rooted, they will make the best decisions for China and its environment," Townshend says.
Now working as a freelance consultant in the field of environmental regulation, Townshend says he will like to become a full-time employee of the company. For Luo Peng, her eco-tourism business is a big challenge. "Our business is quite promising. But we need to get more people know of our tours."
