Mainstreaming Biodiversity Conservation in Tourism Sector Development in Jordan

The aim of the BITS project was to reduce the impact of tourism on biodiversity in Jordan. It would intervene at three levels. At the national level, it would develop a regulatory and enforcement framework to reduce the impact of tourism on biodiversity, centrally (upstream); components would be piloted at the local level, assessed and refined before being adopted nationally and made available for replication and up-scaling. At the regional/landscape level, the project would target public awareness and sensitivity of the value of biodiversity as a tourism drawcard and institutional capacity for planning, monitoring and enforcement so as to manage the impacts of tourism development inside and outside formally protected areas. At the Protected Area site level, the project would work to enhance capacity and management effectiveness of protected areas (including revenue generation, tourism planning and management and community relations) so as to reduce impacts on protected biodiversity and benefit from nature-based tourism and ecotourism. This was the basis on which the GEF grant was released to the project.