Building on its established position as a tourist mecca, Alice Springs Town Council is working on a joint project with CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems and the Northern Territory Tourism Commission. Titled ‘Central Australia Tourism Futures’, the project involves tourist operators and the local community working together to create a vision of how people would like to see regional tourism develop over the next five to ten year period.
The key objective is to ensure a prosperous and resilient future for tourism through the following.
- Identifying the best ways to grow tourism and subsidiary industries in the region.
- Developing strategies to increase the benefits of tourism thereby creating regional economic growth.
- Helping to build local and regional capacities for strategic planning and optimising opportunities.
- Enhancing the region’s capacity to respond to and plan for change.
Over a two week period, the CSIRO project team conducted one to one interviews with various people involved in tourism or related agencies. From these discussions, key issues facing the industry have been identified. Some of the issues include transport constraints; the importance of Aboriginal cultural tourism; training availability; loss of smaller operators; and increasing people’s awareness of the key role tourism plays in the regional economy.
Further community input into the project took place through a series of workshops conducted in early June. These workshops focused on exploring the interactions among the different elements as they influence economic, social and environmental aspects of tourism development in the region. For example, when looking at employment issues, it is important to identify who benefits from tourism development, how it affects the unemployment rate in the region, and how the changing structure of employment might affect future development.
Rather than looking at issues individually, this process encourages participants to focus on how a particular issue or action interacts within a systems framework.Achieving an increase in corporate visits is likely to boost turnover in restaurants but not to the same degree for takeaway food outlets. Sealing a road may affect four wheel drive visits and so forth.
Using computer modelling developed by CSIRO, it is then possible to ‘tell the story’ about the region by tracing pathways that link ‘drivers’ and their impacts. This helps to identify unintended consequences of actions or decisions. Participants then have a choice of scenarios, clearly set out with their social, economic and environmental consequences, as they plot a pathway towards a viable and sustainable future for tourism in the region.
For further information contact Suzanne Lollback, Council’s Director Economic and Community Development, on (08) 8950 0500 or Dr Margaret Friedel, CSIRO Centre for Arid Zone Research, on (08) 8950 7140.
