Tourism and Landscape Protection

Aotearoa New Zealand’s distinctive natural landscapes are an integral component of our individual and national well-being. But despite their importance, we are still seeing poor landscape outcomes. In order to address this matter, the Environmental Defence Society (EDS) has initiated a project to investigate how existing legislative and policy tools could be more effectively deployed to protect important natural landscapes, as well as how a new ‘protected landscapes’ model could be adopted to achieve better landscape protection in New Zealand.

The project includes a number of case studies. This case study is focused on investigating potential linkages between tourism and landscape protection, including identifying opportunities to develop positive synergies between tourism and landscape protection. An overall synthesis report for the project will be released later in 2020.

Most of the research for this case study was completed prior to the Covid-19 outbreak in March 2020 which has had catastrophic consequences for the tourism industry, at least in the short term. Our recommendations do their best to factor in the Covid-19 impacts, but this is a rapidly developing situation, and we recommend further work is undertaken once the situation and opportunities become clearer.