Benefits, Costs, and Spatial Trends of Ecotourism in Iceland

Merrick Hall Room 204

Ecotourism is tourism directed towards exotic, often threatened, natural environments intended to support conservation efforts and observable wildlife. Iceland has experienced a substantial increase in ecotourism in the past 15 years, which now accounts for most of its economic wealth and GDP. Tragedy Of The Commons (Hardin, 1968) describes Earth as a closed system with finite resources. Individuals use Earth's scarce resources to create benefits for themselves and leave the cost of consumption to the rest of society. Iceland is a small, isolated country with a population of 357,000 people in the Northern Atlantic; with its semi-closed environment, Icelandic culture has adapted to scarce resources since Viking settlements in 874 AD. To find the benefits and costs of ecotourism on Iceland’s nature and social life, Dr. Nathan Amador-Rowley and I traveled to Iceland to conduct IRB-approved surveys on locals and tourists and to observe the natural attractions used to create economic benefits on a national scale. After touring the Ring Road and talking with locals and tourists, we returned to OWU to study our collected data, being sure to notice the differences in responses from Reykjavik (the capital) compared to those observations recorded further and further away from the capital. We concluded that the spike in ecotourism had positively affected job creation, increased social opportunities like new malls and restaurants, and created hardships such as large crowds, more traffic, less attention to nature, relaxed rules, and complex language barriers. In areas further from the city, the responses focus on how tourism has affected Iceland’s natural landscape rather than social life.