Successes and Challenges in Sustainable Development Goals Localisation for Host Communities around Kruger National Park

Quest for NetZero emissions in South African national parks: A tourism perspective

Globally, national parks contribute to tourism and conservation. Several iconic national parks in Africa attract millions of tourists. These include Table Mountain, Kruger, the Serengeti, Chobe, Hwange, and Gorongosa National Park. Tourism contributes substantially to global warming and climate change through carbon emissions from tourism activities. Regardless of this understanding, minimal effort has been put into understanding and documenting the national park's carbon risk. The current debate on sustainability transitions calls for a relook of various economic sector strategies to reduce their carbon footprint. This aligns with SDG 13 on climate change action and the sector's calls for carbon neutrality. To that effect, this study examines how South African National Parks (SANParks) seeks to transition to net zero in its park operations to ensure responsiveness to the climate change agenda. This study included 150 interviews with national park and hospitality professionals in 19 national parks to address the research objective. In addition, the study draws upon extensive field observation, document analysis, and 871 tourist questionnaire surveys. Data analysis from the survey was conducted using QuestionPro Analytics, while interview data were analysed through systematic content and thematic analysis. The study found that South Africa's national parks have primarily carbon-intensive tourism facilities from an energy perspective. South African national parks, however, have taken steps to respond to the four essential pillars of NetZero emissions by 2050. These pillars are outlined in the Glasgow Declaration on climate change and the revised Nationally Determined Contributions. Within SANParks estates, these pillars include planning, measuring, reporting, and advocating for accelerated climate change action. NetZero initiatives should be funded in a variety of ways, including by tourists, the private sector, and other stakeholders.

Impact of Education for Sustainable Development on Cognition, Emotion, and Behavior in Protected Areas

Education for sustainable development (ESD) of protected areas is proposed to deal with global climate change and biodiversity conversation. It focuses on the "quality education" and "protection" of the United Nations' sustainable development goals (UN SDGs), not only taking protected areas as the education place, but also as the theme and content of education. Based on cognitive-behavior theory and social emotional learning theory, this study constructs a "cognitive-emotion-behavior" dimension framework of ESD in protected areas, selecting Potatso National Park in Yunnan as a case study. Based on 529 valid visitor questionnaires, this study uses structural equation modeling to verify theoretical hypotheses, and analyzes the impact of ESD in protected areas on public cognition, emotion, and behavior. The results show that: (1) Cognitive and emotional factors jointly drive the behavioral intentions of ESD in protected areas, and social-emotional factors are slightly higher than cognitive factors; (2) Environmental knowledge, personal norms, nature connectedness, and places attachment positively affects behavioral intentions; (3) Indigenous knowledge has an impact on behavioral intentions through emotional mediation, and personal norms have an impact on behavioral intentions through direct effects; (4) Gender and visit frequency are important moderating variables in the ESD of protected areas. These conclusions provide the following suggestions for further development of ESD. First, by forming environment-friendly social norms and focusing on the mining and presentation of indigenous knowledge, the behavioral intention can also be enhanced to a certain extent; second, improving people's emotion can also promote people's behavioral intention, especially referring to optimizing nature connectedness, strengthening place attachment, and creating emotional connections; Third, specific groups of people should be taught specifically, and improve the supporting services of ESD.

Businesses’ Role in the Fulfillment of the 2030 Agenda: A Bibliometric Analysis

Companies worldwide can play a fundamental role in the fulfillment of the 2030 Agenda. This paper aims to determine the scope of the existing literature about the role that organizations play in contributing to the advancement of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). A bibliometric analysis is conducted considering the papers specifically focused on SDGs and businesses published from 2015 to 2021 in journals indexed in the Scopus database. The analysis shows that approximately 80% of the studies on this topic have been published in the last three years. Moreover, only one journal (Sustainability) has published more than the 50% of the publications on the subject. The final sample is divided into 11 clusters that analyze different perspectives within the same research topic, and, in all these clusters, practically all of the papers have been published in the last two years, which confirms that this issue is increasing its presence in the academic world. This work extends the existing research on the subject, taking into account the publications of the last year, so it is an update on this “hot topic”. Moreover, it contributes to providing a reference frame of the state of the art of this research topic and can orientate researchers in the development of future studies

Sustainable Development Goals Localisation in the Hospitality Sector in Botswana and Zimbabwe

Many countries have fronted tourism as a tool for achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in their voluntary national reviews. Nevertheless, very few studies have examined how the tourism industry has been localising SDGs. Therefore, this study is borne out of that knowledge gap. A qualitative approach comprising the use of primary and secondary data from integrated annual reports was adopted. The study found some progress made by hotel companies in localising SDGs. It emerged that Cresta Hotels and the African Sun group of hotels are only at the inception stage of SDG localisation, focusing on several SDGs that respond to the socio-economic and environmental demands of the environments they work in. Given that most of the work under the SDGs only began inception between 2018 and 2019, there is still a long way to go before meaningful progress can be reported regarding SDG localization, with preliminary evidence showing that the hotel industry is likely to have made significant inroads when the SDGs lapse in 2030 if their efforts are not disturbed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The study recommends continuous monitoring and support for the sector as the SDG framework offers a better and more focused sector to achieve sustainable and responsible tourism in Zimbabwe and Botswana.