Sustainable Tourism Development as the Basis of Arctic Landscape Conservation (Case of Ust-Lenskiy Protected Aera) in the Republic Sakha (Yakutia), Russia
Résumé
Tourism natural resources are the basis for the development of the sustainable touristic activities in the North; defining the characteristics and specifies of the development of regional tourism and the implementations of touristic infrastructures. One of the types of tourist resources are the landscapes, which play a leading role in the development of ecological, adventure, scientific tourism, as well as hunting and fishing. With the introduction of eco-tourism, new landscapes are used in the tourism turnover. Eco-tourism rapidly developing across the world. Rapid growing demand for recreation, which is determined by the growth of urban population and their interest in the nature, contributes to the development of eco-tourism in the Arctic. As a result, the environmental factor is becoming an economic category: the conservation of environmental features and “natural” environment (stability criterion) becomes economically viable. In the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), as well as throughout Russia, are rapidly developing a network of protected areas at three levels: Federal, regional and local. The purpose of this work is to study the development of ecological tourism in the State Natural Reserve "Ust-Lensky" of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), created in 1986 to preserve and study the arctic natural environment of the Lena River delta. This research is supported by the Russian Scientific Foundation program “Land Ontology: Semantics, Semiotics and Geographic Modelling”. Landscape analysis allows to create a classification of the types of ecotourism according of the landscape’s characteristics and territorial resources. The most suitable places were identified for eco-touristic environmental practices in the Reserve of "Ust-Lensky" with the creation of tours for cruise-ship tourists especially equipped for ecological trails, animal watching and scientific tourism. The implementation of the sustainable development of the natural reserve is necessary to establish a set of measures tourist infrastructure. With the development of eco-tourism, the interests of local authorities is focusing in the social development, as well as reserve’s to improve the quality of services.