Ecotourism development trend : benefit or threat for the environment ?

1. Introduction
2. Sustainable development, a new fashionable concept
3. Sustainable tourism VS mass tourism
4. Ecotourism, a questionable rightfulness
5. Conclusion

1. Introduction
I will develop in this paper the ecotourism issue, try to understand the ins and outs of this new form of tourism, and evaluate the impacts that can have on the environment. The tourism industry takes nowadays an important share of the world economy and will probably continue to increase in the next decades. It represents a good alternative to develop economically many regions of the world and reduce unemployment and poverty without inevitably destroy the environmental equilibrium or the different traditional lifestyles and cultures. However, to be feasible, ecotourism development projects has to face many challenges for being economically profitable without missing its goals. I will attempt in this paper to understand the reasons why ecotourism became so popular through the concept of sustainable development and how the application of this concept has been possible to the tourism industry. At last, I will try to understand if ecotourism is beneficial to the environment and local communities, or if it represents a new threat for nature. I have used for writing this paper books from several authors and reports from the French television.
2. Sustainable development, a new fashionable concept
The growth of the world population and the rising living standard increase pressure on non-renewable resources. The resources’ exhaustion and the global warming phenomena have alerted the public opinion on the necessity to change the consumption’s and development’s model. Nowadays, we do not measure anymore the level of development of a country only by its economical growth’s rate (GDP per capita), but also by using new indexes more comprehensive or qualitative including socioeconomic, political or environmental