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Coral reefs provide important ecosystem services as well as economic and cultural benefits to society. Yet they are under significant threat from anthropogenic and natural threats, including climate change. Australia's Great Barrier Reef (GBR) is one such reef undergoing significant change. More radical interventions that go beyond traditional forms of management are being considered to help repair and restore the GBR. These are based on science and technologies that have yet to be widely tested. This paper reports on a study that seeks to identify and understand support for such interventions, and to understand the antecedents that explain support. The Norm Activation Model (NAM) was extended with a sample of 468 domestic and international tourists to Cairns, Australia. Personal norms had the largest direct influence on support for interventions, followed by attitudes. Awareness of consequences had a large positive impact on personal norms and a smaller positive impact on attitudes. A negative relationship was found between information and attitudes. Personal norms and attitudes also acted as mediators between awareness of consequences, information and support. No differences were found between domestic and international tourists. The results are discussed and theoretical and practical implications outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainable destinations must deliver products that perform better than their competitors and at the same time protect key environmental drawcards. This research explores the environmental–economic interface of a major destination, both as a case study in how to approach this complex relationship and as a contribution to the methodology of tackling the need for understanding competitive pressures as part of sustainable tourism strategy creation. Using the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area (GBRWHA) as an example, the paper assesses 21 key environmental values, including Indigenous culture, against market-based factors, in terms of their importance for visitors as regional drawcards, satisfaction with them and the way in which changes in them might affect trip numbers and duration across different regions. While the natural values of the GBRWHA are found to be the most important drawcards, satisfaction scores were significantly lower than importance scores for a number of these values. Visitors responded more negatively to the prospect of environmental degradation than to the prospect of a 20% increase in local prices: the detailed impact depends, however, on location and visitor mix. Clear ocean, healthy coral reefs, healthy reef fish, and lack of rubbish were the top four most important values. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper challenges the accepted tenet that conservation creates attractive tourist experiences and high satisfaction rates, and explores the nature and value of partnerships between protected area managers and tourism operators. It develops a model to examine the linkages between natural resource management and nature-based tourism industry performance. The model uses input measures (such as the expertise and financial resources put into maintaining a healthy ecosystem), output measures (visitor perceptions of the environment and their experience of it) and outcome measures (satisfaction scores), to examine these linkages. Whilst the links between input, outputs and outcomes appear relatively weak, results suggest that operators can strengthen those links through high service quality, effective interpretation, in order to produce higher visitor satisfaction. The relationship between the natural environment itself and satisfaction was less clear, perhaps symptomatic of the “messiness” of protected area tourism systems where cause and effects are not always clear. The study suggests that perceptions of the natural environment and the nature-based tourist experience are best mediated through the tour operators’ input into creating and maintaining quality staff, to complement and demonstrate inputs by protected area managers, within the context of long-term partnerships between natural resource management and nature-based tourism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]