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The present book offers guidance on possible strategies and actions that African countries can adopt and implement with a view to strengthening their destination brands and rebuild their tourism sectors stronger. Prepared in collaboration with Africa Tourism Partners, the guidebook collects valuable insights and expertise from African national tourism organizations as well as examples of effective destination branding from Africa and beyond. It concludes with recommendations, operational frameworks and practical tools aimed at supporting African countries in advancing their branding and strengthening their competitiveness towards a stronger Brand Africa and the socioeconomic development of the continent through tourism.

The Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic hit the tourism industry particularly hard, affecting livelihoods and exacerbating some pressures on the natural capital resource base. Supporting the tourism sector recovery is an opportunity to build back better, ensuring that business investments lead to a sustainable and resilient shared-growth pathway that is good for tourism and the natural capital on which it depends. Further sustainable management of the Blue economy could more than double its economic contribution to global relationship with economic sectors across coastal landscapes and markets. The experience of the State of Palawan in the Philippines is explored in this note. It serves as a useful model for weighing the opportunities and challenges typical of coastal tourism areas and exploring natural dependencies therein.

Following the global shutdown of tourism at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, small island developing states such as The Bahamas had their economies immobilized due to their heavy dependence on the industry. Beyond economic recovery in a post COVID-19 paradigm, the blue economy, blue growth, and associated activities offer pathways for a more resilient economy and is well-suited for The Bahamas. This paper suggests conduits for economic development using a traditional strength, coastal and marine tourism, in conjunction with the emerging fields of ocean renewable energy, offshore aquaculture, marine biotechnology, and bioprospecting. The interlinkages between each activity are discussed. Knowledge gaps in offshore aquaculture, ocean renewable energy, marine biotechnology, and marine environment monitoring are identified. In each sector case, strategic and tactical decision-making can be achieved through the exploitation of ocean numerical modeling and observations, and consequently should be invested in and developed alongside the requisite computational resources. Blue growth is encouraged, but instances of blue injustice are also highlighted. Crucially, pursuing blue economy activities should be given top national priority for economic recovery and prosperity.

The primary goal of this study is to investigate the present coastal management plans for blue carbon ecosystem management strategies using content analysis of the local plans of select municipalities in the Philippines. The analysis generated eight (8) clusters based on keywords focusing on mangrove and seagrass ecosystems, namely: ecological profile, ecosystem services, carbon sequestration, tourism, natural threats, anthropogenic threats, laws, policies, & ordinances, and management activities. The results of this study can serve as a benchmark for local policy-makers in updating their present management plans particularly in branching their focus on integrated management of seagrass ecosystems and advancing technical capacity and knowledge on blue carbon ecosystems.

The aim of these recommendations is to encourage tourism enterprises to develop their operations in a responsible and sustainable manner, while enabling those indigenous communities that wish to open up to tourism to take full grasp of opportunities that come along, following a thorough consultation process. The recommendations also target tourists that visit indigenous communities, and whose numbers are steadily increasing given the growth of tourism motivated by the interest to experience indigenous cultures and traditional lifestyles.

Sea Turtle Friendly™ Tourism acts to reduce impacts of development and recreational activities and provides new and sustainable livelihood opportunities to protect these species. Sea Turtle Friendly™ encourages the tourism sector to take pride in their role as sea turtle stewards and in securing a long-term future for a turtle-based tourism economy. Certification also empowers tourists to select hotel and excursion options with the confidence that they are truly supporting conservation efforts. The Sea Turtle Friendly™ Tourism standards include criteria on: nesting beach management, conservation of foraging habitat, beachfront lighting, guidelines for visitor behavior near sea turtles, monitoring, community involvement, and education and outreach.

From 2014 to 2017, the National Park Service (NPS) Social Science Program (SSP) worked with RSG via a contract to develop and conduct pilot implementation of an in-park Socioeconomic Monitoring (SEM) program for the National Park System. This report describes the results of the pilot SEM program and presents an implementation plan for a long-term SEM program. The NPS SEM implementation plan includes specifications and rough order of magnitude (ROM) cost estimates for a Base Model and information about potential methodological enhancements to the Base Model.