Geotourism, geodiversity and geoheritage in Australia - Current challenges and future opportunities

Geotourism, in addition to its primary role in promoting tourism to geosites, raises public awareness and appreciation of geodiversity. It fosters geoheritage conservation through appropriate sustainability measures and advances sound geological understanding through interpretation. Currently in Australia, geotourism is in its infancy and faces a range of challenges, including lack of awareness and support within the geological professions and varying degrees of acceptance by natural resource managers. Geodiversity on the other hand is now widely appreciated as part of the natural heritage, and is being integrated into government policy concerning the management of national parks and public lands to a degree approaching the stewardship of the native flora and fauna, as greater emphasis is placed on the underlying control of distribution of the living environment by geology and landscape. Conservation of geodiversity and geoheritage is thereby progressing rapidly in some areas, though in others such as the development of geoparks in the Australian context, significant barriers have yet to be surmounted. The recent Symposium on Geodiversity, Geological Heritage and Geotourism, organised by the Linnean Society of New South Wales at Port Macquarie in September 2010, provided an opportunity to discuss these matters from a number of viewpoints, including government, academic and the private sector.