Ecotourism and Adventure Travel Geography

Ecotourism is generally defined, following the International Ecotourism Society's widely cited formulation, as "responsible travel to natural areas that conserves the environment, sustains the well-being of local people, and involves interpretation and education," a definition meant to distinguish it from generic nature-adjacent travel by its explicit conservation and community-benefit goals. Costa Rica is the country most frequently cited as ecotourism's flagship success story: after adopting an aggressive national conservation strategy from the 1970s onward that eventually placed roughly a quarter of its territory under some form of protection, the country built a tourism brand around its cloud forests, such as the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve, and its extensive national park system, with ecotourism becoming, by the World Bank's and Costa Rican government's own accounts, one of the country's largest sources of foreign-exchange earnings and a central pillar of its reversal of earlier large-scale deforestation.