The Planeterra team is excited to share more about our partnership with IUCN, the International Union for Conservation of Nature. We are working together to deliver community tourism development, with a focus on four protected areas in Peru and Vietnam.

Protected Areas play a crucial role in maintaining the health of the planet and our health as a species. They are important in conserving biodiversity and ecosystem services, such as food, clean water supply, medicines and protection from the impacts of natural disasters.

Tourism is a key economic driver to support protected areas and provides a way to foster the public’s and local communities’ connections to protected areas. Tourism can provide a powerful argument for the conservation of protected areas because it depends on beautiful natural areas, healthy wildlife, and authentic cultures.

Sadly, COVID-19 has already resulted in the closure of parks and protected areas in many countries.

There are concerns that as a result of job loss, many people living around the national parks are considering bringing back unsustainable forms of income, including hunting, mining and deforestation. 

Tourism provided jobs and a sustainable income for families and helped protect the environment.

Planeterra and the IUCN are working in Peru and Vietnam to bridge the gap created by the pandemic on tourism in and around priority protected areas and kickstart economic recovery through community-led tourism.

Our goal is not to simply get tourism back to where it was before, but to do tourism better for the people, wildlife and ecosystems in the targeted protected areas.

Over the past 2 years of the pandemic, we’ve witnessed the vulnerability of people, livelihoods and economies to the declining health of our environment.

However, it has also highlighted that human health and well-being depend on healthy ecosystems and biodiversity providing essential goods and services.

Recognizing that tourism operations need to become more sustainable and nature-oriented, Planeterra and IUCN are working with Indigenous people, local communities and protected area managers to build up safe, equitable and sustainable community-based tourism experiences.

These experiences are strengthened with community benefit-sharing programs to support community recovery from the pandemic and to build a better future for people and wildlife.

To achieve this, Planeterra will provide training to community members to improve their tourism businesses and increase their benefits.

Planeterra has welcomed six people to our team, Phuong Tran and Richard Bazan Callupe, who will be managing the project in Peru and Vietnam as well as two more team members in each region!