Eco-tourism's green brings in the greenbacks

AFP, June, 2008

PARIS (AFP) — Flip through a travel brochure, and you're likely to see pictures of sun and sand in Southeast Asia, of luxury lodges in the Serengeti, of scuba diving in the bejewelled coral reefs of the Caribbean, but what the brochure won't reveal is the environmental cost of your trip.

That beach in Thailand may once have housed precious mangroves, which were ripped up to make way for your hotel.

To provide you with a piping-hot shower and tempting meal after a safari, your Serengeti lodge may be tapping into precious water supplies, dumping waste in exchange and paying your waiter just a dollar a day.

And to get you to the Caribbean, your plane will spew out tonnes of carbon pollution, thus stoking the global warming which is killing the very corals you want to enjoy.

This is where eco-tourism comes in.

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