The travel industry must pay more attention to where supplies such as food and toiletries are sourced if the planet’s rainforests are to be saved, a WTM World Responsible Tourism Day seminar was told.
Andrew Mitchell, a biologist and senior advisor to the Prince’s Rainforests Project and a director of the Global Canopy Programme said there was a possibility of a breakthrough deal to preserve the world’s rainforests at next month’s United Nations Climate Change conference in Copenhagen.
However, he added more needed to be done by travel companies. He urged them to tighten up their product sourcing, ensuring they were “rainforest neutral”.
Companies may not realise it, he said, but many products contained rainforest-sourced products, either directly, or indirectly. These included meat, palm oil and soya, as well as paper.
Mitchell said: “Tourism uses timber and paper on a vast scale. Your meals and your shampoo may well have products in them sourced from land where rainforest once grew.
“The egg you eat may be from chickens raised on Amazon soya feed. We are all eating the Amazon without realising it.”
Mitchell said that each year, 13 million hectares of rainforest, an area the size of England, was lost.
He urged participation in the Forest Footprint Disclosure Project, a simple questionnaire that enabled companies to find, for example, whether beef served in hotel restaurants was fed soya sourced from cleared tropical forest.
Mitchell said such an audit would help reverse the current situation where “rainforest is worth more dead than alive”.
“What we have to do is turn that on its head,” he said.
He also urged the industry to support the inclusion of shipping and air transport into carbon trading agreements and added: “Tourism has a hugely beneficial role to play. Ecotourism can generate dollars and [environmental] protection, but ensure that once you find these paradises, they are not the first thing you change.”