Other land uses' effect on nature based tourism

Nature-based tourism (NBT) is a great industry in the Nordics, which is rich in rural areas and nature. The NBT-firms are often small with few employees, and with an economy with a small margin. They are thus vulnerable to sudden changes in revenue and expenses. These changes may origin in changes in demand, or in their supply of natural resources or its quality. I discuss in short that nature-based tourism is a tourism-type that uses nature in an undeveloped and/or wild form. I also discuss what previous literature within the fields of nature-based tourism and natural resource management has to say on NBT’s dependence on quality nature for revenue, and how other societal structures and –uses, such as power-development, mining, reindeer herding, forestry and cabin areas affects nature itself as well as tourism opportunities, and how the two create conflict situations. I show how a destination operates, and have developed a model to explain the conflict between NBT and other stakeholders, and explain what the conflict at its core is. I describe how I treat data from the survey in Stensland, et al. (2014) to identify three NBT-firms types through cluster analysis of a parameter on different business segments’ importance for revenue making, resulting in a new variable. I ran ANOVAs on this new variable with the aforementioned parameter and two parameters on the NBT-firms’ operational goals and effect of other land uses on their operations. I validated the results through posthoc (Scheffé’s method), KMO and Bartlett’s test of Sphericity. The two last parameters underwent principal component analysis to find goal- and impact categories, and I validated those through Cronbach’s alpha. The NBT-firms are one of many stakeholders in natural resource management, fighting various other stakeholders for the same areas or the same resources, but for different reasons. I ask in the thesis what types of NBT-firms there are, whether there is a relation between the type of NBT-firm and their operational goals and how different other land uses affect the type of NBT-firm. There are three main types of NBT-firms: Guiding experts, Accommodation facilitators and Package experience. Guiding experts specialize in guided activities (e.g. expedition leaders), Accommodation facilitators specialize in accommodation and facilitating self-guided activities (e.g. cabin-rental near the coast for sports-fishermen), and Package experience specialize in being a complete destination or nearly one, with guided activities, accommodation, transportation, catering and information services (e.g. a conference center based on an old farm). They all have somewhat different operational goals, and largely sustainability- and lifestyle-type goals, which pertains to upholding the quality of the resource they use, both for business and for the owners themselves. They are all negatively affected by heavily impacting land uses like windmills, hydropower development, powerlines and mining, because they disturb both the land areas these facilities are on, and the land areas around as well. Forestry and their roads, cabin areas and reindeer herding affects the NBT-firms are less, as they facilitate access, enriches the resource or are not as disturbing. The source of conflict lies in how the present and future quality of nature is, and what it will become