IAU Astrotourism Workshop | Dark Sky Tourism: An engine for sustainable socio-economic development

hi everyone it's a good afternoon for me but i'm sure it's good morning and good evening for many of you joining us today in our iau workshop on astrotourism this workshop is organized by the international astronomically union regional office of astronomy for development where we're going to be discussing different aspects of astra tourism this is part of the current flagship project that the office of astronomy for development based in cape town south africa is developing and we just thought it would be a very good uh point to bring together different experiences different case studies and also different best practices of foster tourism from all around the world we're gonna have a series of talks and we're gonna have these talks without questions and all will ask these questions only at the end if you have some questions and you're following us on youtube please write down your questions you can just pose your questions as we go and at the end during the q a we're going to bring your questions and we're going to be asking them and discussing them with the different participants here before we start my name is pedro josu i'm going to be the host and i'm based at leiden university the netherlands where i co-coordinate the regional office of astronomy for development and without further ado i think i'm going to ask our first speaker professor steve pompeo to share a screen stevie's at the moment a guest professor at lydon university but he's also the emeritus professor at noir lab united states of america steve thank you so much for joining us and steve is going to give us a personal but hopefully very interesting overview of astrotourism thank you steve thank you i hope my screen is now visible to you just perfect okay great well i want to thank pedro and evina and michelle and the other organizers for this great opportunity to share some ideas with you i especially thank all of you are participating from all across the world and and your families as well in some places it'll be very late at night and others well before sunrise before the start of a very full day i'm sure i know many of you work long hours operating astronomical facilities and programs and some of you have small businesses so thank you for attending my overview has a very simple summary dark sky astrotourism as our international field has great potential and some significant risks and opportunities i'm very optimistic because i think we're very good at problem solving let me give you an example uh two astronomers a long time ago one scottish and another from the netherlands uh led a search from south africa for stars closer than alpha centauri the big star in the lower right on the left-hand uh picture with the right understanding and approaches they identified a nearby star we now call proximin proxima centauri which we think is the closest star to our solar system if you are wondering where it is it's a little tiny i don't know if you can see my cursor but this little star here that's not it but that actually represents this little star right here and this is proxima centauri so with the right understanding the right approaches the right problem solving techniques of a proper motion a parallax they were able to identify this star i think we can do the same thing in our chosen field today [Music] i feel very fortunate to have the right preparations for astrotourism from my work as a classroom teacher planetarium and museum worker research astronomer space instrument developer passionate amateur astronomer and a person who ran a full-time consultancy in science education that is small business however like i think many of you who are also well prepared my involvement here today and over the course of my career is actually inspired by the beauty of celestial phenomena and my love of the night sky and especially the dark night sky my first astronomy experience that really got me going in astronomy was when i was seven years old on uh vacation camping and vasa verde national park in colorado which is the state of the us where i was originally from and i saw a beautiful dark night sky as an evening program from the rangers and i was hooked from that moment on and that that interest continued to getting my master's degree in physics teaching at colorado state university where i was inspired by roger culver who led a tremendously vigorous program to get people interested in astronomy of all sorts and many others have been inspired by roger and people like john berentine from the dark sky association as well i also led some dark sky programs inspired by george wallace at colorado state university at migrant farm camps in rural areas of colorado and these people who with their tremendous willingness to learn about about astronomy their interest in getting their families involved uh really inspired me in this way and that led to also an admiration for some friends of mine who are professional whitewater river guides bill and jamie alexander and they were part of a professional guide association which showed me the value of getting together sharing resources working to elevate the field and if you ever know anything about white water rafting it's very uh can be dangerous if you don't do the right things so i've had the opportunity now to spend about 100 days in the grand canyon under very dark skies with my friends all on private trips and that that has been a great opportunity to connect with the night sky then other experiences like the lodestar project in new mexico the tremendous programs in chile with the touristic observatory programs inspired by my colleague now deceased hugo ochoa and the formation of a dark sky sanctuary there then continuing with the international year of astronomy white house star parties and so on and now the new project we have at kitt peak national observatory to refurbish the visitor center all of these have really cemented my interest in astronomy in the dark night sky and in astrotourism so i just put a few pictures up to remind you of the beauty of some of these places i've visited the visions of some of the people i've worked with and even in the lower right you can see a individual who used to work at kitt peak who's now started his own astronomy tourism business it's pretty much a one-man show from chuck's astronomy adventures chuck dugan but he's now figured out a way to bring all of his equipment to different places to bring the astronomy to the people rather than to try to make them come to him for these great experiences so that's been very inspiring to see these different efforts all across the world and to see what can be done with a large group of people or a very small kind of one-person operation so where is the niche that we're trying to find in our field of astrotourism well first i want to just say that it's it's a very dynamic niche whatever it is and there are a lot of evolving norms in this field and the related sub-specialties we we need to think about which which of our programs which of our facilities are part of cultural tourism or activity-based tourism a broader category or root tourism such as in chile where you have the root of the stars and other places as well real tourism initiatives nature tourism but i think where we're going to end up because we're very idealistic is in the category of principled ecotourism at least it's somewhere some of the programs we have are going to go that way to principled eco-tourism and i just wanted to remind you that this isn't like a new thing this has been around for a long time and my friend and colleague george wallace at colorado state who was a professor of what was originally called recreation resources and now is in the college of natural sciences has been working in this area since he left the peace corps many years ago started migrant education programs and did many many other things to protect uh places to protect special places on the earth so he has a 1991 paper on this topic he has a 1995 address and some more papers on this topic and the basic point he makes which i think is something we have to keep in mind is that the principled ecotourism is not always about just a checklist of things like for example in the lower right is the eco camp patagonia voted one of the best hotels in south america i've never been there but it looks fantastic it's in a beautiful place it uses um these these domes that have solar panels probably has composting toilets the menu is probably using food that's from the area and so on and so on so they're doing a lot of things right for sure i don't know all of the details but george would say if he was here today that he would say well it's about the ethics it's about the communication it's about working with the community it's about the indigenous people it's not always about the checklist of solar panels or a low carbon footprint or this or that that's all important but there's more to it than that so i just wanted to remind that that we can build on the principled ecotourism efforts of others over the last 30 years we have many exemplary astrotourism programs worldwide and we're going to hear about a number of them today and they are great models for us to think about they fall into many different categories some are about sustainable socioeconomic benefits for communities or small astronomy businesses some have to do with how education can play a role in these ventures some work more closely with indigenous groups others are working with highly specialized audiences or diverse audiences obviously there's stewardship of dark sky areas and many of these programs and then some are very special experiences it could be a long-term astrophotography experience or it could just be an additive experience you're you're tasting wine and you get a little bit of astronomy at the end of your wine tasting so there's many different varieties of the astrotourism experience and there's many different ways to create those high quality experiences our challenge is to capture and duplicate the best practices of creating quality experiences which by the way don't necessarily depend on super fancy equipment or even super fancy places that are incredibly beautiful depends a lot on people and how they've been trained our challenge is what i call well what many people would call total quality management which which is a whole movement that applies not only to manufacturing but education to health care and other other things where you want to maintain a high quality level we have to focus on the human dimensions of quality management the good news is that we have a lot of assistance from international societies from the tourism field and many other resources that are available and just to give you an example when i went online to look around for books on on ecotourism or nature-based tourism i immediately came across from one this is from one publisher this took me all of five minutes to find these books that are currently available many of them in electronic form on on some of these basic principles that we might want to be thinking about so this points out kind of two things one is that we're not the experts in these things and that there's a lot a lot of things to learn but also points out that we don't have to reinvent the wheel because there's an awful lot of research phd dissertations visitor studies planning studies strategic plans and other things out there that can benefit us greatly for example the maturity of the tourism field from an academic perspective is a great asset and i don't mean academic just in the sense of people publishing papers colorado state university what i mentioned i did my master's at and was an adjunct faculty member for 10 years um has the warner college of natural resources this includes the college of forestry and and so on and they have a whole program on human dimensions of natural resources they have another whole program on protected places and if you look at their curriculum for human dimensions of natural resources and natural resources tourism these are the courses that are required for the very first degree in that area they have a master's program they have a phd program as well they have post-doctoral researchers as well but just for that one program on natural resources tourism they have courses in a wide variety of different areas including marketing history natural resources ethics business global awareness and so on and so on if you look down the list of general courses the basic courses that they take after the most general ones the specific courses for that major and their internships the variety of internships and then their advanced courses you see what the field really has to offer to to us and what those people who are trained with these bachelors masters or phds in the field can also offer us in the long run so i want to pursue now a little more specific aspect of what what we can do to improve our field so i want to do a little thought experiment for you and that thought experiment is suppose we've been charged with developing a strategy for the international society for astro tourism i don't think this society exists maybe some form of it exists now but far as i know it doesn't but let's say we're starting this and we the people on this call are the founding members we're quite diverse so i've taken the liberty to provide a mission statement which might take quite a long time to come up with but suppose our mission is to encourage the worldwide expansion of these high-quality astrotourism experiences so what do we do we would start off of course by having strategic planning meetings for this new field and we'd try to get all the different organizations and people and other people who can help us along maybe even a professional planner who can help us do some strategic planning in a sensible way and we could start with a very classic approach there's what we call pestle analysis which looks at sort of the longer term trends that are external typically to an organization that's not so useful at the moment let's do what we call swot analysis which is an honest assessment of strengths weaknesses opportunities and and threats in other words we want the big picture we want to understand what we can do to grow to make better products to go to new markets expand and so on so let's do a quick swot analysis now i again these are things that should be done collectively but i'm going to kind of speak for us okay now i have a slight problem as my computer doesn't want to let me move on okay there we go so let's talk about strengths what are the strengths of our people in the organizations so again we're highly diverse we're talking about some big and some small organizations individuals so obviously these don't apply to everybody in every way but bear with me for a moment we have a great diversity i just mentioned that we have a great variety of professional backgrounds we have a variety of scales one thing we do share in common is a great passion and enthusiasm our ability to problem solve we're very committed to nature stewardship many of us to change in the world it's a very new field so creative approaches are needed and appreciated in general and we appreciate them we have a commitment we have a strong desire to share astronomy we have an idealism very few of us are in this for the money we also have life experiences of many people many of whom are older or second career people uh who brought in a lot of experience and we certainly have an abundance of audacity and hutzpah we like to just get out there and do something okay that's great those are all the things we have to work with and many more that i didn't want to didn't have room to put down so those are fantastic strengths and that makes me feel very very good now if you've ever done a swot analysis you actually realize that your strengths and your weaknesses are all related because they they're part and parcel of the same thing some of the things that are your strengths actually can can lead to some problems so a weakness it's a less mature field we can't always agree on what is the best practice or where the field's going we have a diversity of opinions and values some people want to make money some refuse to make any money we all have we all have probably a pretty limited background in tourism but some of the people in our field are experts uh business is something that a lot of people in our field aren't really that interested in business details oh that can't be too hard i'll leave that to somebody else marketing oh that's just communication isn't it no it's a specialized area some some parts of our field are driven by the money they're small businesses they have to make money or they're out of business and often i have to be honest about it we suffer from the dunning-kruger effect of things we know very little about we think we're pretty good at just because we're smart people so uberus and arrogance uh we under-appreciate the role of money to actually make things done we're so used to making it happen without money we we sometimes under appreciate the importance of money and that creates some extra risk we also rely on individuals who are passionate and since many of our organizations are pretty young we sometimes suffer from the founder syndrome where strong personality or strong vision is there to push an organization along but maybe there's a new vision needed maybe there's a new direction needed but the founder is still there saying let's let's go the old way and finally we're rather modest i have to say and timid towards fundraising and big projects okay that's my assessment you don't have to agree with me but it's a great discussion at some point what are the opportunities that we have we have elements in our environment that can help our field um there's lots of good things that create opportunities mainly being a young field and so on but opportunities to create facilities in new regions it's really wide open for opportunities with more people traveling with more disposable income more interest in national parks we have great programs from the international dark sky association and other places for certification of dark sky parks reserves starlight reserves and so on so that's fantastic great opportunities okay let's move to the threats because that's what we're going to have to address at some point there's elements in our environment that can cause problems or trouble or can set us back and these kind of fall into two categories one are general threats that we may not be able to do too much about because they're cultural we really can't change ourselves that much and they're just there so we have to be aware of them and aware of the effects of those threats on us um tourism is on its back legs many touristic uh observatories and places are almost dead uh especially in chile um so that's um a problem um the uh there's competition there's capital investment required we don't seem to have a lot of that we often concentrate too much on ad hoc and heroic efforts and so on so we have these long-term issues which have a problem but we have more specific issues which i think we can do something about that's that's what's exciting let me let me go into a little more detail on these one is we have a bit of isolation desire for sites research sites to to to do research to be isolated to have the darkest skies to not be interfered with by by visitors we have the isolation of our practitioners again we have many small operators lack resources and a lack of place to provide on-site training and a lack of money for large ambitious uh programs which could could work on some of these things but the good news is that we have an agency to change these issues that relate to lack of support so what am i suggesting let me go through this now because we're getting to the end of the talk we could expand our resources and create some synergies for example this professional society that i mentioned in the thought experiment we could involve lots and lots of people from lots and lots of sides of our of our niche and that can help help all of us move together and move forwards in a concerted way we can encourage the expansion of visitations for example so visitations are typically people-oriented you have so many guides you only allow visitors one day a week and that creates a fact that you have a lot more demand to visit historical places research observatories like cerro tololo or kid peak and we just can't serve those without scaling it up so we could take a strong statement to scale these things up of course it's going to cost some money it's going to cost some more training efforts but it isn't like we have to invent a new model or change things around tremendously it's a pretty easy thing to do we can focus on creating improving professional resources and we're going to hear more about that today as well we can also work on creating on-site training programs at at some high capacity facilities in other words places that have an education mission that aren't trying to just make the ends meet and make the books balance at the end of the month but have a strong mission for training and education we can use those sites potentially as an opportunity to move people uh through them to train them and do that so i'm just throwing out a few possibilities for phase one phase two in different parts of the world and places like kid peak and lowell observatory in arizona or in chile at sartololo inter-american observatory which is the branch of the u.s national observatory um those are places that um potentially could be these these sites and um finally i'd like to say you know we've got to i think move on and dream and go big we have to think about large fundable projects or programs that advance the astrotourism goals of getting a critical mass and critical amount of services in order to serve our entire community so projects of 5 million euros or more or mid-scale projects of a quarter of a million euros would be very useful not just to do the project but to advance the whole critical mass of the field to mobilize people to create what we need to do for training sites for other for other reasons now the good news even though these are ambitious projects the good news is there's a lot of expertise and experience with large projects available the lodestar project in new mexico which i mentioned briefly earlier was a project to design a whole mesa top full of astronomy activities for the public it had a tramway going from the bottom of the of the land in mexico up to the top of this mesa on top of a large mesa that was uninhabited so it had a planetarium off to the side it had observatories it had museums exhibits that had all kinds of night sky activities in an incredibly dark sky similarly more recently and lodestar was never built and that's an interesting story by itself that part of lodestar was never built the enchanted skies park part of it was never built other parts were built the open deck observatory at lowell observatory in flagstaff is a great example just opened up there's a wonderful youtube video that explains what it looks like how it's being used what the facilities are encourage you you'll get the i'm sure you'll get this presentation so you can see the link i encourage you to take a look at that video of this tremendous and and the people who helped make this thing happen are on the call today so there's people with great expertise in community organizing community fundraising uh design of science centers design of planetariums design of outdoor facilities and who have navigated these kinds of situations not not dozens of times hundreds of times in their career that's pretty impressive so in conclusion there is tremendous promise in this field we have a lot of things to think about there's a lot of approaches quality issues to to deal with we need to make some steps in a forward direction to support infrastructure and to develop a critical mass my fear my is that the risk is that this field will stagnate or evolve in unwanted ways in other words others will take control maybe they're not as interested in the quality maybe they're not as interested in ecotourism or community development or rural this rural rural facilities so we need to take charge find out what we want and and sail towards it uh we do have the agency the power the ability the motivation to encourage the growth and professionalization but we have to do this with a strong recognition that there is a quite a diverse field of large providers if i can call them that such as research observatories which have a strong education mission have a lot of infrastructure have beautiful sites and dark sky areas and small providers who are spread also throughout the world the larger providers are spread in south africa in chile the united states and a few other places australia new zealand but there is an amazing amount of expertise okay thinking big and obtaining significant money early not not not not designing the project and and hoping we can find some money to do it thinking big and thinking about money early i think is perhaps the least risky way to progress and the most efficient way to move these things forward so i wanted to emphasize this last point this is my own personal view and i know some may disagree but i'm speaking as a person who's led many ambitious uh all volunteer projects such such as the galileo scope project and some of the international year of astronomy projects and unfunded projects as well as some underfunded uh projects some barely funded projects some that were adequately funded and some that were very very well funded so i've played this game from all sides i've been involved with about 20 million dollars of of money that we went after competitively in educational projects and won and we've created some great projects we've also done an equal number of projects with very little money and i think that we have the opportunity to accomplish a lot more by going after the money now i'm not at all unidealistic i believe very strongly in what margaret mead said many years ago that never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world indeed is the only thing that ever has but i'd like to put a small friendly amendment on that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens with some resources can do even more thank you very much for your attention thank you so much steve also for your talk and also for providing a interesting overview of the different aspects of astrotourism but also in terms of in in terms of your vision what you expect from the field we really appreciate that and i know it's resonating with some of the viewers so if you are following us on youtube please make sure that you post your questions you post your questions on the youtube because we're going to bring them back and i think without further ado we can just uh move on to our next speaker that is professor kumikatu and kumikato-san is going to talk about global sustainable tourism hopefully gummy cat i think you have to turn on your camera and your microphone is it working for you sorry i seem to just lost the connection no problem but you are back we can see you well yes and you can see your slides so feel free to initiate to start your presentation okay thank you very much i'm very sorry thank you so much no problem it was perfect hello everyone my name is university happiness institute my friend just me if you're a professor at the tourism and happiness institute no one would take me serious but um today i'm very very honored to be part of this workshop because i'm really i'm not a specialist in uh dark sky or astronomy but i specialize in sustainable tourism so today um i'll be very happy if i can just in this short presentation i can offer some community perspectives in sustainable tourism because in japanese uh tourism is seeing the light this character is light and i that's something i really believe in um so we the tourism can discover or identify and also enhance the light if we did it properly and so tourism can be a really great platform that can involves diverse stakeholders in a defined destination according to unwto tourism can be a major benefit because it can account for one in ten jobs employment as well as ten percent of that global gdp so this is obviously precoc at the same time excuse me the major impact could be negative so tourism uh before kobet uh when tourism obviously having a very downturn at the moment but um pre covet the two uh serious problem that we uh scholars in tourism talked about was that the climate change as well as over tourism um climate change because tourism cannot do without transport obviously and then which uh its emission could account up to five or sometimes eight percent of the global emission of which 75 is transport related and some of the over tourism uh effect uh i think many people in in tourism areas has experienced that acceptable congestion or closure or the cancellation of the events and even some care is a movement and obviously that is a very serious mission for tourism so we need to reduce the tourism footprint in emission or energy use or as well as food waste obviously but at the same time uh tourism trying to do the uh what it's supposed to be doing finding the light so challenging various exploitation inequality discrimination and bias so our really mission in sustainable tourism is to bring ecological and social justice that along with this uh global shift towards uh five p's from the triple bottom line so the p obviously represent prosperity rather than formally economic profit and partnership and peace i have seen i have a privilege of working with many great communities such as this one was that the sea community divers in japan uh sorry i'm going to skip that and the community based tourism initiatives in this is a flores island in indonesia um this probably is one of the famous uh recent [Music] example in a community based initiative in indigenous tourism the closure of uluru in central australia where the community's sacred place that or in more popular term it's rock that was closed for uh climbing in as of 2019 october um another very great uh example um in the recent community initiatives or this is national institutes but um this is that pledge and vision put forward by the community um so this is uh tourists actually asked to sign the pledge uh bef when they actually arrive in the country so similar uh approach has taken in new zealand like tiaki promise and tiaki is the maori word in in new zealand maori term care for the land or the uh iceland has taken a similar uh approach as well just uh in the last few minutes i'd like to talk about uh in uh uh in australia so this is the my only uh dark sky related tourism experience so that was related to the return of hayabusa in 2010 which is after seven years of journey and hayabusa returned to the earth um that was central australia so what we did and we obviously you know we were with a research crew but as well as that was our tourism experience but what we did it was very uh we thought it was very important to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land so in australia it is the customary becoming a customary so when you have any kind of events or gathering we always acknowledge and pay respect to that the indigenous community uh the traditional owners of the land so in this case that the region was called umera and then uh the traditional owners was kokova and antakalina people so we went to pay respect this elder uh eileen winfield and also we actually had a community engagement and schools and then we talked about the traditional stories and of that place so this is just um uh oops i just want to play this video so this is oh sorry this doesn't work doesn't sorry i have to maybe i have to come out once oh sorry it seems just froze and i'm not gonna play so this was that the return uh the moment of the return and also what was very important for us that this was uh made at the end of after our trip so this was a pay respect and the gratitude to that traditional owners of that the um region that was made by the japanese jaxa so um this was very very my very short perspectives that are giving value to the community perspectives in sustainable tourism so thank you that was my ten minutes sorry that my um it was no problem we got your message thank you so much unstable no sorry no no no i think it will [Music] it worked well and thank you so much for your insights and also your perspective i think was very interesting and i think a lot of the interesting aspects that we need to keep in consideration for astrotourism so i'm gonna ask sonal to start her presentation and i'll introduce sonala acostre as our next speaker and so now please turn on your microphone and share your screen and so now it's going to talk about the global himalayan expedition a project that has been also funded by the iu office of astronomy for development grants so now the microphone is yours thank you very much pedro um hi everyone good morning good afternoon good evening to wherever you are on the planet my name is sonalis kotra and i will be talking about astro stays it's a community-led astrotourism model that leverages astronomy to create sustainable livelihood for communities that are residing in rural and remote areas now as the tourism industry navigates through the kobit 19 crisis and the world gradually reopens interest in nature-based and open-air experiences are on the rights the tourists of tomorrow are now looking to move away from overcrowded touristic hot spots to actually not just explore remote of the destinations but also connect and connect with the communities that they visit now the question is that how can the rural areas benefit from the opportunities that the restart of tourism will bring and how can we actually help them build back better now by the very nature of astrotourism some of the most incredible wantage points for great dark skies are predominantly located in rural and remote areas but from but speaking from an astrotourism perspective the communities that are residing in these remote areas have not been integrated very well in the entire tourism value chain and that's one of the reasons that uh despite growing very strongly in the last couple of decades astrotourism has not been able to kind to bring the kind of socio-economic development that it could actually bring so uh in 2018 we uh collaborated with the office of astronomy for development to create a community-led astrotourism model called astros taste which was owned and operated completely by the communities a bit of context about our organization global himalayan expedition we work in the indian part of himalayas to provide clean energy access to remote communities and we have till date we've electrified almost 151 villages impacted 67 67 000 lives and officer thomas said 500 tons of carbon dioxide uh and we've always followed a very holistic development approach in the sense that um in most of the community based interventions you cannot just parachute into an area you know try to do an intervention with the community and move out it has to follow a process where you engage with the community um and you know bring them up to speed get their buy-in and then build on the layers and the models that you bring to make it more sustainable so we start with solar electrification uh move on to digital education health access and then finally in the areas that we work in himalayas because tourism is you know one of the major drivers of econ we were also looking at creating these astro home states uh so like i said we work in the indian part of himalayas it's it's a long mountain range and lack of electricity education and access to sustainable monetary incomes are some of the critical problems that the people residing in remote himalayan communities space but as we all know it has rich culture and heritage something that has attracted tourists from all over the world and tourism in the last couple of days has last couple of decades has actually risen exponentially uh and has actually become the major gdp contributor for the himalayan region but one of the assets that we wanted to explode and build on were the clear night skies of himalayas something that was under and we wanted to see how we could harness the potential for that so uh and and this is uh our team uh like i always say nanofaras are astronomers all of us electrical engineers and and that's one of the reasons that you know we were able to see astrotourism through a different lens uh how did we start i mean i'll take you through a small case study of our implementation in himalayas no matter how clear or grand an idea is in your head for a community interpretation uh intervention you cannot just walk in with you know a big fat telescope into a community and say that we are here to create a new channel of revenue generation for uh for you it doesn't really work that way so uh before we actually started working with the communities uh and you know started our training workshops with the people who actually wanted to implement this model our team leaders on the ground actually visited almost 15 villages um you know talking to people mobilizing them and working with the community is very very strongly to talk about the intervention and to also see what their expectations are if an intervention related to astrotourism is actually brought into the area so you see a picture of one of our team leaders talking to the villagers in man where this with the asteroid says have been set up and um and you also see the pangong lake on the banks of which the astro cesar uh and you know there they have been mobilizations focus group discussion basically you know uh making your model strong enough so that you have a community buy-in and when you actually move out of the area it is sustainable enough that the community is able to maintain it um and then after we visited 15 villages 30 women were selected uh and we started training the community on telescopes and basics of astronomy and the way we went about it was because uh the people that we worked with uh intern in the workshop came from a very diverse set of educational background right from zero to elementary to even high school education and we started engaging them with science by deconstructing astronomy and making it more relatable to them uh by their own cultural connection with the skies and you see some of the sessions where you know there are people who are even differently challenged um and most of them were women who were actually running the homestays um and and uh it is also important that you equip your team members with latest gadgets and tools uh so you see a picture of one of our team members in astro stays using stellarium generally what they do is uh you know we have sky maps available and you know at the start of the month they generally kind of scan through the sky maps look at stellarium to see what particular objects would be there at different times in the sky so that they are also able to set their expectations of the travelers and if there's an overcast etc there are alternate solutions that are also available um and and the picture of one of our astro stays um and one of the best things about astro stays that is astrotourism i would say is that it necessitates overnight stays so um the the astro stays have actually been set uh have actually been set up on the banks of a very famous lake called pangong and people would actually travel from lake which is the capital of ladakh to generally make a day trip to pangong and then come back now because astro stays was set up it necessitated that people actually stayed back so there were two channels of revenue generation that started coming to the community one was because of the accommodation that people started staying back and second was also because of this targeting session if people were even staying in some lodges or resorts nearby and they knew that you know there are some stargazing sessions they would also just walk in um and this would also help the community to earn an extra money uh these are pictures of some of the astronomy sessions uh taking place in the villages uh and and the the the five-member team the the team in man consists of five women who actually run it and you see one of them using the lasers uh and they say that it cannot be sustainable if it is not accessible so how do you really close the loop i mean you can create these brilliant hotspots of you know um touristic models in an area but if people cannot visit there travelers cannot actually come there it really is of no use so the whole point of creating astro stays was to bring the money directly into the communities um and once you know they were set up we started doing the market linkage basically promoting astro stays on otas platforms like booking.com airbnb and other offline channels as well for example you have these visitor information centers in most major cities and we started you know publishing these small pamphlets and brochures about the astro state so that people who were visiting the cities would come to know about them and visit the asteroid states uh now the last year was very very hard on the tourism industry so what did we do uh the money that was generated uh through the astro stays was actually reinvested back into the community they bought 10 solar heaters and 15 greenhouses were set up uh something that so so the money that was actually earned through these sessions actually helped to help the community during the covet period so you see uh you know solar heaters being set up and greenhouses which actually made the community quite self-sufficient during these very very hard times um and this has been the impact so far we have in we had almost we set up in 2019 and we had almost like four to five months a very short period to test the pilot and test the waters and in those four or five months of implementation we created six astro stays trained 30 women and we had a revenue which was generated around 3 200 this was both through the accommodations as well as to all the stargazing sessions that was the community um was conducting uh and we linked our astro stays very very strongly to the sdgs because uh you can only close the loop if you are actually monitoring and evaluating your model very well so so we have these parameters and the sdgs which we follow very very closely and keep monitoring us to see how we can improve things better and now that the world is going digital we are also trying to create an app uh both for the travelers as well as for our communities back in man for the community specifically to broadcast any special celestial events or any special events of interests that they could actually talk about whenever these targeting sessions are happening uh and for the trial especially to kind of see where all these astro states are set up what is it that give that they can expect in terms of cultural and community uh aspect and what are the objects that that that is that they can expect to see when they are in a particular area uh so the way forward looks very exciting as nature-based and regenerative tourism emerge very very strongly uh from the very small success and our experiences that we have seen in the himalayas we we do feel that you know there is huge potential for astro states not just for rural communities but also for communities in mountainous areas or for even that matter wildlife protection areas which have access to great skies because of almost negligible light pollution um and we do believe that you know i think it's about time that you know we create this common ground between the two domains of astrotourism of astronomy and tourism as well so um thank you very much really hope that you enjoyed this journey into himalayas thank you so now i'm i'm i'm sure that the uh also the the followers on youtube enjoyed a lot there was some very nice comments and also thank you so much for for showing us some amazing ways of really improving the communities local communities remote communities throughout the tourism i think your project is very inspiring and i think also thank you so much for also helping so much organizing this workshop but we're gonna have some time for questions later on so i'm going to uh invite the professor hiliko agata to share his screen uh professor agata is from the national astronomical observatory of japan and he's also the founder and the president of the board of the sauron tourism japan the astro tourism society of japan thank you again for joining us thank you pedro so today i hope uh hello everyone uh i hospital tokyo japan okay so first question why do we look at at the stars i think there are two contexts for the promotion of astrology okay first context of society as already a professor mentioned astro tourism is an important sdds matter [Music] including this astro tourism or contributes to the sdds especially economic growth developing countries and the local area of each country not only social context we have a personal context personal context means uh for example please see this journal of personality and social psychology 2015 published dr azar's paper titles are the small self and through social behavior this psychology field paper explained things we feel ah i hope to explain either a strong motivation rather than wonder wow we we feel this uh uh emotion by the uh uh star watching uh athleticism or other uh or examination so we feel small self and try to prove social behavior to society if this research result is true astrologism is very important action for us not only stds or success but also personally it's a very important occasion and finally a bush way uh our grs is a better word to throw all these activities i i believe so so how shall we encourage astrology series i hope to explain uh case study in japan uh 2007 t uh we established a solar tourism promotion comes i am a director and who work with jackson astronauts and japanese government tourism agencies support our activities by the way what is the surah surah means authorized japanese under this infiniation including the sky space universe then uh solar tourism including the astro tourism and the space truth watch okay so our council activities is our first marketing research second information dissemination and to user web or books also and tourism event human resource development consulting and brand making so our members our council members three categories exist first category is a local government japan or example prefecture prefectures are small towns village so 25 21 regions already participate uh especially local uh very population field nature will be beautiful mountain site and uh second categories are companies companies are not only tribal agencies ana is a big trouble english but a victim is a telescope company and the dance is a uh advertisement agency and oscar is a model and actress agency very er [Music] and finally individual members personally can participate for star sommelier we call that these star navigators uh under uh three yeah this year supported by the government japan uh tourism agency uh totally seniors uh it's a matching fund government support us the 0.2 million u.s data totally okay so then we encourage our islands for all fields or region especially a countryside beautiful stargazing place i hope to explain marketing research result we hope to research the uh tourism of japan's market to size so use this panel system we do at random 1 million to understand their motivation how to they hold hoping uh so number of participate in strategism this is mentioned it is estimated that 8.5 million people are already participating throughout tourism activities okay and but this 8.5 million including the uh go to the planetarium front term is uh uh uh eighty percent including ho this five five point eight to eight point five million to eighty percent and uh eclipse show is a fifty three percent uh science medium beating the fortitude and meteor shower observation started to uh participate the trip as athleticism is uh ninety percent one point seven million already participated in japanese people so okay and our prospect our protest it is estimated about the 40 million people are expected to participate in the solar tourism in the future so planetarium is a big huge number i expected but as this powerpoint shows in order of participation in trip to recruits uh three starry skies uh 36 it's a huge number 50 million japanese people are expecting the prospecting astrologers it's 10 times about 10 times big number or already actually persons so all that change means uh our world change means so i uh we already published the guidebook or this guidebook is like like uh these books in japanese astro tourism guidebook so this guidebook is a published timing amazon ranking uh of course um ebooks the first place not only this field uh this travel guide managing and books fields assad praise god so very very people a lot of people interest for this astrologism field but uh last year's survey of our marketing research uh awareness means uh people who know the solatus name no person is only six percent of our japanese popular total population it means uh we need more strong encouragement necessary i think so so finally i hope to show the uh pr movies thing time coming so please stop to pedro something time coming sorry japanese but please [Music] enjoy [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Music] thank you for the trailer and for the presentation for the incredible ecosystem that exists in japan for astro tourism that really i think is really inspiring maybe for other other countries how to get the astro tools organized and i'm sure they can learn a lot from from your model so i think i'm going to already ask our next speaker that's going to be hannah douglish she's going to talk about astrotourism research and practice hannah you can start sharing your screen and and mute yourself and thank you so much for joining us thank you okay so thank you everyone and it's really a great pleasure to be here so i have been um involved in astrotourism research for just over a year now and i've been based in at the university of namibia and the university of oxford um so here is going to be a summary of kind of the things that i've learned from doing a bit of tour research myself and the tour the other research that i've come across in astrotourism so first of all as has already kind of been discussed what is astrotourism so it can come under two main branches which is one space tourism which is literally um tourists actually traveling to space which we're not really seeing now but potentially within the next few years and the other being terrestrial astrotourism so essentially astronomy astronomy-related tourism taking place on the earth and this can involve many many different activities for example going to visit a space center seeing a rocket launch visiting an observatory during the day or at night time doing astrophotography visiting an aokio astronomical site like stonehenge traveling to see a total solar eclipse or visiting a dark sky area and doing what i like to call dark sky tourism so some of the reasons why i like the terminology of dark sky tourism possibly more than astrotourism is because astrotourism is so broad and so vast and does involve so many different activities um and i think dark sky tourism helpfully sort of narrows things down so that you're really specifically talking about activities that are taking place in dark sky places um or oasis during the night and i think there are other advantages as well i think sometimes the word astro or astronomy can be a little bit scary for people um so dark sky tourism can possibly be a bit more accessible in terms of say communities that are interested in getting a job or learning more about running dark sky activities to tourists that might want to go to a dark sky place and do some stargazing and it's really clear in the name dark sky tourism what you'll actually be doing if you're doing those kind of activities um so as we've already seen many times already during these talks these are the sustainable development goals and just a few more examples of how dark sky tourism relates to some of these goals and also i would personally think that dark sky tourism possibly links to even more of the goals than astrotourism in general so we've already heard some nice statistics for economic advantages here's another paper that was looking at dark sky areas in the colorado plateau and found that over the next 10 years tourists will be spending almost 6 billion in the area which will create two and a half billion dollars in higher wages many many jobs 10 000 jobs at least a year annually um and what's also great is that it brings visitors to dark sky areas um during off peak time so in the winter where possibly you have less tourists than during the summer and so this can be quite a sustainable way of helping rural and remote communities getting more um opportunities more work and trying to help reduce um the effects of of say younger generations that are moving to cities to find work um so this may help to to mitigate that as well as bringing say new infrastructure to rural communities of course there are also many social benefits and one of the things i find interesting um is the lack of research on um say mental health and well-being from being in a dark sky oasis and um there is quite a lot of research on say your health and well-being for being in nature being in a forest but all of that focuses um on the daytime and not during the night so there has maybe been one or two papers that does look a bit into being in under the stars in a dark sky area and how that might impact your mental health for example in the field of environmental psychology but there is so much more i think that can be done in this area and um it would be great to see more of that happening also there are many many benefits for bringing say dark sky tourism to rural areas it brings more educational opportunities not only for the tourists but also the people that are living there and to learn more about astronomy and science in general and there are also ways that we find in which it can help to preserve indigenous knowledge so where i've been working in namibia in the past um i've found that there are some villages where there's some people are living and they're actually losing the stories about the stars that they would be told by their grandparents around the fire um and so when i asked them what are the stories that you remember they can they couldn't remember any so now is really a crucial time um before it's even completely too late uh to to find out the stories and make sure that they're not lost forever then of course there are many environmental benefits of dark sky tourism here's just a map that comes from nasa that looks at the light pollution all around the world um because it's essentially an image taken at night time and here's some work by fabio falci who has actually worked out that 83 percent of people around the world are living under light polluted skies and this increases to 99 of europeans if you're just looking at europe specifically and that is really really enormous so light pollution really is everywhere where people are living and there is a lot of work being done um in how to reduce this and get communities to engage and governments as well um and that's also obviously a lot of energy that is being used to power these lights um there has been some work done by the international dark sky association which found that it's worth about three billion dollars of of just extra wasted light that isn't really necessary at night time which also equates to a lot of carbon that's being wasted and being put into the atmosphere as well of course that's not to say that there are many impacts on people but also on wildlife and it really light pollution interferes with all sorts of animals insects and plants and there are even some studies that say that cancer can perhaps be a result or not a direct result of light pollution but there could be some effects going on there as well um so looking more closely at namibia where i've been working um namibia really is a very good country to do dark sky tourism as this map here shows most of namibia is very very dark and this is the capital city vintage right in the middle there and um there's many opportunities so i'm using astro tourism here because there are things that can happen during the day like visiting um the hess telescopes which is one of the world's biggest high energy telescopes which is located near the gamsberg mountain there's also the hoba meteor right here which is the largest meteorite in the world um there's also a dark sky reserve the first um dark sky reserve in all of africa and also many astro farms where essentially amateur astronomers have been traveling to namibia for decades now um to basically do a lot of astrophotography and do some amazing stargazing so really lots of potential for opportunities so i my work has kind of been looking at training local tour guides in astronomy knowledge so that they can maybe get more jobs at lodges and get more of an extra income because many lodges in namibia aren't actually offering stargazing activities and many lodges are very very brightly lit so that you can't really see the stars uh where you are but it would be really easy to if the lodges just had a bit more knowledge about the potential of stargazing um say after dinner with the guests and would just dim their lights a bit so we've kind of been working with different organizations in namibia to to share kind of the opportunities and potential of dark sky tourism and astrotourism there finally uh just to mention that we've been developing a new academic network which is essentially to bring researchers together that are interested in dark sky tourism and and also dark skies and society there's a lot of research on light pollution and the environment how it impacts our physical health and there's really little research on say the mental health aspects and also the socioeconomic benefits and and and sustainable other sustainable development goals as well um so essentially this network is to try and encourage and boost um the research and evidence side of things so if you are someone that's doing that or wants to do that um and you're an academic please let me know and i'll definitely be happy to add you to this network so thank you very very much and look forward to the questions later thank you hannah and thank you also for also so much for bringing also some of the your perspective in terms of not on terminology but also the importance of research and the overlooked areas of research and wow we can connect thank you so much so i think we are ready to move to the next speaker and our next speaker is uh apollonia rodrigues and she's going to talk about i'll give a dark sky reserve the first starlight reserve polonia feel free to share your screen and mute yourself we can see your slides but we cannot see you or yes okay perfect yes yes i started the the share the the screen without putting myself in the sound and it disappear so um i'm talking here uh let me first say that i am from the field of managing and in tourism and planning so i'm not from the side of astrophysics or astronomy so i started this uh dark sky in portugal as a destination for astro tourism for our purpose not as uh because i wish it to to observe and so on so it's the different kind of uh perspective and approach to to give you an idea this is what we have now in terms of territory it's the dark sky okay the first one that started in 2007 uh we grew up we grew since we started with six municipalities now we have 10 and part of spain um with the with our work uh and the knowledge of our achievements uh two other regions in portugal asked us to to be involved in this network of dark sky and uh we have now dark sky shishtung it is in the center of portugal with uh 4 000 square kilometers and we have another one in the north of portugal so having a network uh with the interior of portugal inland area inland area in portugal so we have another one it's uh around the natural park the the only regional natural park we have in portugal and uh it's around 1600 600 1600 kilometers square kilometers so this is uh what we have now in portugal three areas under our concept that we will explain a little bit and uh all are certified the first one to be certified and the first in the world as starlight tourism destination was alkiva as i said in 2007 and and nowadays it represents 40 percent of portugal working under this um brand and dark sky concept so as i said it is a territory based uh and in the concept in a mission dark skeleton was the first one to born in 2007 so we passed all the the growing of the market since 2007. and what we develop we developed our destination under a model that i started to work in 1998 with another project the european network of village tourism and what we do is a model of sustainable development in our sustainable development in our destinations is an integrated model so all the elements are part of our sustainable development model and in this case in in the dark sky we use the the resource sky night sky as our unifying in differentiator element elements and then we join all the natural heritage and cultural resources community and the tourists as a party integrating part integrated part of our dark sky process or destination development model what we have is a concept in the brand dark sky uh we have other brands uh working with under our the same uh organization the dark sky cave is also a separate brand the dark sky patrol it's a patrol of guardians that we are developing uh to create more empathy in the light pollution battle that is a terrible battle to to fight and it's supposed to be easy uh to make people aware of how transversal and important could be uh fighting this uh type of pollution but in matter of fact it's not so easy for men in situ situation many especially social situation and we have also our concept of astrotourism uh that is uh where we consider the atmosphere above us and the sky above us part an integral integer integral part of our destination so we developed a special concept our dark sky uh is a brand it's our brand our registered brand but we have a certification that is what we defer from other type of destinations we could have two three or more certifications and our name is one the certification that we have above us are different so we decided to follow the starlight tourism destination certification because not only uh guarantee three cry technical criteria plus the availability of the resource so we have clear skies more than 50 percent of our nights are uh clear skies in our case in our cave not in the other two but in our cable we have 286 nights uh medium and nice clear nights per year so it's a very interesting uh way because it means that we can offer during all the all year round our product and of course we have a huge commitment with the protection of the night sky and um a touristic offer uh high quality uh based in in these principles of sustainable development plus the fighting the light pollution means protecting the night sky um as i said always certifications qualify the destination but is the brand that confers reputation and recognition at the international international level in terms of our dark sky concept we have a huge commitment within territorial identity and sensorial tourism because for us it is an experience it is something that you have to bring to your you will bring to your life to your self inner being so means that is an experience something that you could uh added value to your uh person as a person um but uh all our destinations uh are based in in the the territory identity you find so what you find in our cave is different what you find in valdo or another territory that we will nationally i mean in portugal or outside portugal we we will develop we support the creation of specific and complementary night activities and we integrate all this offer in a network of official partners that pass for a process of training auditoring and support and we also have a code of ethics uh not only for the public partners but also for our official network of partners our mission because we are a non-profit organization uh that started with all this process uh we always try to fight to to show people that dark sky and our concept in brain dark sky can be uh perfectly or can be perfect compatible with uh development so we don't want to to get back to the when there was no artificial la and light but uh we say that if we do in the right way we can have uh astro tourism our dark sky okay voldemort and also uh guarantee that these regions continue to develop all can be done with an equilibrium and uh for us the night sky is the world mankind uh heritage so if it is a humankind heritage all of us should be dark sky or astro tourism or whatever ambassadors so depending on what you consider as um the name this is part of our observatory is the official observatory of the art health so where you we show and have sessions of stargazing uh this is a old primary school in a small village 60 people living there so it's a very small village but uh that integrated this concept and it's working with the old part the the the identity the the territorial identity with the new part that is the astro tourism in in this territory here it is uh what you could see above us in our territory our milky way and us astro uh photography workshop so it's a very uh requested activity in our territory here it is archaeoastronomy because we also developed this symptomatic in the north of portugal especially in the north of portugal this is a group of astro tourism workshop this is what you can capture as a deep sky objects from our observatory i just give you here one idea this is another part of territory with water and the the milky way so you can know what we have another object of deep sky means that the sky should be good to to to allow these captures this is a the type of landscape we have here in olympia so you can it's open few people a few light pollution so it's why we could start it immediately with a high quality of sky and we are close to a international airport close to all the facilities you can can find so you have accommodation restaurants of all type five stars uh motels uh whatever you can find in terms of accommodation and all the tourism activities and all other attractions plus the dark sky on it and the for example this is an event of presidents that you can do here uh bird watching at night uh we have also developed this type of activities the the wine of course we are a wine region so we do blind wine tasting so at night uh we work also uh i'm not from the i mean i didn't develop my part of uh as a expert in i prefer the practical point of view but also develop some research so we are part of the working group uh wayne wto uh scientific tourism and astrotourism so to develop more this uh thinking about what we could do and how sustainable development based in astro tourism can be good for this type of regions rural regions and also other organizations uh we have also partnerships with other uh international organizations and in this case with embassy of united states in portugal so they bring us to this territory some astronauts or expert scientific experts from nasa for example and since 2013 we were awarded for many in many organizations by for our work as a learning activity experience as a tourist destination or sustainable our work in sustainability so 2020 it was very good we were in sustainability green destinations and other awards for the work we are doing not only in astro tourism but also mixing are using the resource uh night sky in implementing an integrated model that could bring and create a very good type of tourism that is high standard tourism people that stay more longer than the usual type of tourism two three four nights and they prefer to be in in the regions that they are still more close what what you expect from communities so it's not uh tourism that is already prepared just for tourists it's tourism that also can be consumed by the residents so these people like on this type of tourists that we are attracting now they um protect they they feel very interested to be in in the protected area not only for the night sky but also in in a more wider way this is other fortune some other awards and into 2021 we are still getting some different awards just to finalize i want to show you some more pictures that you could take in our region and to see how beautiful is our milky way around all the air our area say 7 000 square kilometers i also wanted to say that we have an astro tourism conference it passes so quickly that you couldn't have time to see it but let's see a show here uh the international astro tutoring conference by starlight it will be in between 8th and 11th of september and we also uh organized or created uh some years ago the astroturf society so it's dedicated to think over the astrotourism process and how you can develop these using the under the concept of dark sky brand or other concepts or other brands but uh we started this uh with the thinking that we have to manage the practical point of view with the research but uh thinking in our destinations thinking how we can bring added value for these regions uh thinking not only in the earth but also joining the sky as part of this uh concept and the dynamic complex that is a destination so thank you i had few times so i have to be quick pedro thank you knowers i appreciate and also congratulations also on the amazing awards that you have been receiving over the last years i think it's also recognizable to work and somehow pioneering work that you've been doing in connecting tourism in a in a very broad way with with astronomy and the dark skies so i think we let's move to our next speaker that is ben cauley from the south africa's association of field guides and it's going to talk tell us more about advanced astronomy qualification and the program that they've been putting together ben thank you so much for joining us today and i can already see part of your presentation and i think you should be able to share to and mute yourself and turn on your camera nothing will be able to see you okay great uh hopefully you guys can see the screen and both here and see thank you very much for the opportunity i'm very honored to have been asked to to present here and uh yes thank you everybody for attending uh that's quite a tough act to follow from the previous presentation um but i just wanted to give you a little bit of an introduction uh into uh myself and what i do and what we are trying to promote within the guiding industry in south africa so i have a small it is just myself at the moment independent company uh celestial events uh which is sort of where all of this began so in terms of my history i'm actually from england originally and i moved to south africa about 15 years ago because of my love of wildlife and tourism and was fortunate enough to work within the guiding industry in in and around the areas close to kruger national park but i've also spent time in east africa and other provinces within the country here um and yeah so i always found that guests were particularly interested in learning more about the night sky as part of the sort of more traditional safari experience uh just because of what it can offer i'll go into a bit more detail as to why i feel that's such a good opportunity to grow the industry in a moment but just very quickly so celestial events was formed a couple of years ago um and we specialize in doing what i call our night sky safaris so traveling to destinations be it two guests internationally or locally and delivering uh hopefully educational and entertaining evenings under the skies here um obviously the big part of what we're going to go on to discuss is the the for gaza astronomy training which i'll come to in the next slide or two we also do some photographic tuition astro and long exposure photography tuition i also have a virtual stargazing branch and i do presentations and there are other things in the pipeline as well and so a lot of this is going to be quite relevant to what sonal was saying about nature tourism and particularly particularly from hannah there and with regard to the guiding industry so in terms of why i think game reserves particularly in south africa are such a perfect springboard to to launch something like this is well as we've already discussed south africa has is a bit of a hub for astronomical research thanks to the crude and the southwest of the country perfect weather conditions water one skies and obviously the the large telescope and research set up there at the moment such as the the salt south african large telescope and the meerkats uh and the ska and so on and so forth uh but in terms of how it really helps the game reserves because we are situated or the majority of game reserves are situated in and around the area close to the kruger national park which is in the sort of north east of the country um that is where the majority of international tourists do come on their trips for safaris and so on and so forth to give you an example krieger national park alone uh this is obviously pre-covered and the the effect that that's had on tourism uh would welcome well over a million visitors each year and that's just into the national parks that's not including the the private reserves that border that land um we've got incredibly good dark skies uh the majority of skies in and around the kruger national park area are sort of portal two to portal three skies so we have a wonderful opportunity to to view fantastic southern skies from here and the whole idea of stargazing is so synonymous with the safari experience just because of the ambiance around it a lot of those international tourists are coming from large population centers in europe and in america and other countries and they just haven't seen uh dark skies like we can offer and how some of these other initiatives are also uh utilizing as well so it creates a remarkable ambiance especially with the the animals as well there's something very special there's a connection between all of us and nature i feel and when you can look up and learn about the stars and sort of immerse yourself in nature while surrounded by wildlife and and hearing the wildlife around you especially at night time is a is a pretty unique perspective and it is something that um leaves people with tremendous memories uh i believe more so than just seeing a lion for example but hearing a lion roaring whilst discussing the stars in the background is a is something that uh it's priceless in terms of an experience uh the other thing of course in south africa is we have a very rich cultural heritage uh hannah touched on that for us in namibia as well and so we have lots of nice sort of cultural and tribal stories that can be shared so certainly when we do our evenings we focus very much on the cultural side of it i should go on to say that i'm not a trained astrophysicist i don't have a degree in it i'm a keen amateur that wants to to make a difference and to educate and then finally that sort of holistic experience the whole idea of the reconnection of nature when people come on safari it's generally to spend more time amongst the animals and find themselves to get away from the rat race and there's no better way to do that than by staring up at beautiful clear skies and imagining what other possibilities are out there so let me go to the crux of this before i run out of time um so i'm here to represent for gaza the field guide association of south africa um and they are the governing body of our industry who have been operating since the 1990s um and or 1990 i should say and their main crux of of what they do is to regulate the safari industry and ensure that a high level of knowledge uh is passed on to all of the guests from the guides as a guide we are sort of a translator of nature you have to be a good communicator and what for gaza has done is come in and tried to set a standard uh that is across the board to ensure that all tourists get the same experience so as myself as being a member for gaza for many years what i discovered whilst doing a lot of safaris out here is that there's a bit of a lack of knowledge in astronomy in general and stargazing and navigating the night sky is part of the the syllabus but it is just one of many modules that have to be covered in order to get the qualifications so i approached for gaza a few years ago and suggested that we could do a specialist astronomy syllabus as an emanuel and a qualification to try and encourage the growth of guides abilities to to translate the night sky for guests with a particular emphasis on the environmental uh and the cultural aspects and so that is what happened and uh so we produced uh this it took quite a long time to put together because i was sort of doing full-time work as well but very proud of what what it is though it's the uh the astronomy regardless of learner manual with advanced astronomy here it is in in person and it's obviously quite a bit too much to go through exactly what is in there but in terms of what's covered what i particularly wanted to do was try and have a what i would consider a one-stop shop as a guide we get asked an awful lot of questions uh whilst we're out there people are very inquisitive these days so i wanted to put a little bit of everything in there as i said it's not too technical in terms of the science because it's more important to be able to pass on that sort of basic knowledge to people and let them go on and explore the discipline more for themselves so just very very quickly some of the chapters that are covered a lot of it in terms of planning so when the best time to do these uh evenings are in terms of moon phases and celestial events how to use a telescope how to use binoculars a lot of bit of a little bit of the history of it all then a section on the astronomy in south africa in terms of what's happening down in crew and other research and obviously then galaxies quite in detail about star formation because when you're going on to discuss deep sky objects such as star clusters and nebulae you need to have a little bit of background knowledge what i call celestial nomads which are things like asteroids meteorites comets and so on and so forth sun the moon and the planets with particular emphasis on how they mirror the earth or not so in terms of say the the atmospherics and the weather conditions and the geology found on those other worlds and then obviously the crux of it really is the constellations and with particular emphasis on the mythology and deep sky objects which are visible to either the naked eye or binoculars some telescopic objects have been covered but not many lodges have access to telescopes at the moment so it was more important to be able to do sort of naked eye and binocular observations so in terms of the process of how it works um what we offer is there is a on-site theoretical and practical training normally conducted over four or five days with lectures and practical sessions each day and each night lectures obviously focus very much on the book again with that emphasis on the communication and the understanding of concepts rather than specifics and the ability to translate and to communicate to the guests and then the practical training we break down into various different sections such as non-zodiacal constellations such as like the diagonal constellations we'll do one evening of telescopic viewing and then a chance for excuse me a chance for a recap and then most importantly for the guides to to practice presenting that material to each other so there is also a workbook which has to be completed based upon the manual that's out of that's about a thousand marks or so in total so there's chapters on uh referring to each chapter in the manual and then the a theory exam that needs to be written it's a two and a half hour exam again based upon the book and uh for gaza has a pass mark of 75 for all of their exams because well we don't want to be average we want to be better than average so we have quite a quite a high pass mark which we we expect people to get to and then because the practical application of this is so important we do a practical assessment process where why there are a set of specific outcomes that need to be tested in terms of the ability to identify what is it visible at that time of the of the year or that time at the moment the night depending on when it's being done um and assuming one passes or a guide passes all of that they will be awarded with the for gaza certificate of advanced astronomy um we also recommend refresher training every three months because when guides are showing guests the the night sky it does tend to change quite a lot uh depending on what time of year it is because you're operating quite a specific time on a night drive or just after dinner so in order to account for the changing skies uh that's that was quite important to do so in terms of how industry reach and how well it's been received bearing in mind it's very embryonic at the moment um and the the recent events over the last year and a half or so have made things rather tricky certainly but to date we've conducted events and training in over five different provinces within south africa and some of the reserves that some of you may have heard of the sabi sans timberwolves thorny bush balconden manuletti those are across various different provinces list of some of the uh the main lodges that we've done training at some of which we've been to multiple times because they've really embraced what they feel that it's the guide to getting from the um from the experience we're also working with some of the fugaza training providers and so guides in the making are also now being given the opportunity to learn more about astronomy as part of their courses we've got a couple of projects on the go and actually in the next few days going up to one of the areas close to kruger to do a presentation for some of the community guides so guides who are not members of for gaza itself but are still qualified guides that want to learn more about the night sky and the cultural stories behind it and we've even had enquiries from other southern african countries uh and east african countries as well as operating our own uh independent training courses for guides who maybe are not currently based in the lodge there have been a lot of retrenchments recently so they can still have an opportunity to come and and learn the syllabus and learn more about it in terms of the photos here this is the team from londolozi game reserve on their airstrip um doing a quick evening this was a local event down here's the guides from um a lodge called mccannie uh simbambili in the sabi sands and another local event just for a couple that we also do so it's been very well received thus far and in terms of of the reception as i said i i can't oops sorry i went too far can't give you too much in terms of numbers at the moment but um when we the training that we have done has been very well received and you can see there's some testimonials i've had from um some very influential people in the industry i've just highlighted areas which i think are quite important things like obviously john dixon who's very well known 40 years of experience the safari guide there recommending future safari guides also involved the training and other things just sort of words i like to pick out that enhanced our guests experience um the guys at mckaney have even purchased their own telescope now on the back of the training totally unique experience and more than educational achieve our ultimate goal of a holistic exp holistic safari experience faster and easier to capture audience and clients attention and particularly this last one more confident about my knowledge base what we found is a lot of guides are interested in it but it's quite a scary topic and you just the guys just need a little bit of guidance to have the confidence to present to uh to tourists that's very important in terms of communication skills the way in which it's being done so other projects that we have sort of on the horizon or the way that hopefully the qualification will grow in time is actually registering the course directly with casita which is the culture art tourism hospitality and sports sector education training authority so that's a bit of a mouthful but they are the governing body of the the tourism and hospitality industry and uh sort of working with them slowly to be able to uh have the course as a stand-alone qualification so that anybody can theoretically have a recognized qualification within the discipline um there's a big push towards astrophotography causes at the moment particularly again with the international tourism coming here for the safari industry we have a lot of access to people um who've got very nice camera equipment and always looking to try their hand at a new skill we were discussing uh starting some school groups but obviously again with the the covid's situation unfortunately that's all somewhat rather on hold at the moment um some astronomy tours to visit areas like the kuru and the research which is being conducted down there and the community upliftment as i said we in the next few days we're going to go and do some more of that locally and obviously we have plans to do more of that in the future as things grow and then finally just some of the problems that i think we as an industry and the the field guide association has is uh general awareness of getting the information out there to people that it's something to do and how well it is received i guess that's the whole crux of where it came from is that they just felt that um guides didn't have a sufficient knowledge of it it wasn't something they were too aware of and this now will hopefully give them the ability to do so hannah touched it as well the ability to find these cultural stories much of the african cultural stories is oral tradition and they're becoming more and more difficult to find and that's why it's very important i think for the guiding industry to be involved because they work so closely with the local communities with the local trackers and staff members and the local villages we have a great opportunity to to rekindle some of those stories and keep them alive um the summer weather in south africa is a problem in the kruger area it's more tropical climate here so we do have quite a few thunderstorms and rain so to look at options like virtual stargazing and virtual reality technology potentially something along the lines of a planetarium in this area to make use of all the tourism that will hopefully return soon and then the last one to mention is the sort of safety and accessibility uh obviously you can't just go anywhere out here and set up at the side of the road you have to be in a relatively secure area so somewhere that is preferably fenced and if you are obviously going to be working with animals from a guiding perspective you need to be very careful that other animals don't come and join you in the evening i've had over the last couple of years lions elephant rhino leopard all join on um evening so safety is very much paramount i'm sorry i think i'm running over time so that's a very very quick oversight uh but the the crux is that it's been very well received so far it's definitely growing and i hope to see even more growth within the industry and more interest over the coming years thank you so much ben and indeed we are running a bit late but uh sorry i guess we also no worries no it's not not your fault i've been keeping leaving everyone to speak a bit more because we have so much so much content and interesting stories to share so i really appreciate that that you're doing that thank you so much for the very comprehensive overview that you provided about the trainings and how do you do it and how complete they are i think it was really really really inspiring also for others so our next speaker is pablo alvarez uh and he's gonna talk about the national strategy to astrotourism in chile thank you pablo for joining us please feel free to share your screen and turn on your camera okay here i am yes thanks very much pedro for this invitation i will go straight to the point because of time well as you may know she is a very small country he we have 17.5 million people that we count for a very tiny portion of world's population however good news are that we have a national strategy for astrotourism so and it it sounds like a little bit like a joke but he because being a small country and and as far as we know we are the only country that has this a national strategy for astrotourism so that is what i will talk a little bit about now this was developed in from 2014 to 2016. it was it was developed by a i lead a small consultancy firm that has been working with governmental with public funding for this purpose and corp is the name of the main agency in our country that gives money for this kind of projects and and this process involved a a all the main stakeholders that public and private and related to science and also obviously related to tourism we had to develop when we started doing this we didn't have like there wasn't any kind of international society for astrotourism as the very good idea that i heard stephen at the beginning of this talks he proposed so we had to develop our own definition of astrotourism and we adopted a very broad view of this so we decided that we were going to put inside our strategy all kind of recreational or touristical activities even those that involved a lot of educational a dimension but we were not going to study those activities that were just educational because they they they were like fit in another box and and we were dealing with things that related to cosmos celestial phenomena and human efforts to study and understand what's going on in the sky so that that put inside our field of study all with ancient a relationships with the sky but also what astronomers are doing today and that can be quite amazing especially in a in when they are in the in the frontier of science as we see in chile a lot we started this this process with three big surveys one on supply we visited every single place in the whole chilean territory that they provided a astro tourist astrotourism experience we made another another study on demand and we were getting figures about public audiences spendings etc and we also made a wonderful survey about the global state of the art we visited places in canary island catalonia france uk arizona california hawaii i'm really sad we didn't have apollonia rodriguez al qaeda reserve in in our scope because i would have loved to visit that place also it really like i really liked it after that we did this diagnosis we identified main gaps and challenges and obviously what followed is what to put this road map for 10 years and five years have passed since then it just i i will just give you a quick glance of some issues that came from the surveys to give you an idea what is astrotourism in chile we identified 129 providers a of eight different types private firms related with tourism public observatories that they they belong mainly mainly to a city authorities or municipalities international scientific observatories obviously planetariums and museums etc we also identified and i think it was this was also a there was other person that mentioned this in a past talk nine different type of products night observations with telescopes naked naked eye night observations visit to scientific observations etc and we counted for 2 000 a 262 000 astrotourist a year and that is a it's funny because that is like a one quarter what griffith observatory in california receives but just that single location in in the us but that is what you will you will receive in the whole territory of chile and we made we we made the the math and we kept it for five million dollars a year in tickets that is rather modest and especially when he i think that was hannah also mentioning a study in colorado that was far beyond this in concerning incomes or revenues generated it which were the main gaps and challenges that we identified that the most important what one was related to a very basic experience design i mean once you are there and you paid your ticket and you go to visit the place what you get from it is quite modest so and they they resembled this 129 they were very very similar one to each other they were too similar went to each other so that means that if you have seen one you don't have too many stimula to see to visit another one and in general terms they did very low um use of the natural and cultural environmental resources all this cultural stories even information about its natural surroundings they were not being intensively used in in their experience design and and another another main gap that we that we identified was concerning guides so that is what what i found that what ben khali was talking to was a very interesting and we have had a lot of that experience during for the past two or three years in chile also and many of the guides they they really would benefit from some kind of astronomical training and also from the some of the improving of their english skills or other language skills that are quite poor in chile uh usually the the the the other main gap it's a it's a very important one in my opinion is that i will show it this way um this is the biggest we can argue about what i mean with that but i don't have time for that observatory on earth i don't know if you have known it personally or some have been there this is alma in the in the northern part of chile this is and this one is the most powerful optical observatory on earth nowaday it will be it will pass to a second place in a couple years when another one that is 20 kilometers from this one will come into operations well the thing is that these places are completely unique so to visit that place is uh is a lifetime experience and they happen to be both in chile however they only receive visitors one day per week and if we count the total visitors of all scientific observatories in celia that we do have a lot of them they are visited only by five percent of astro tourists in chile so this this is a severely underused research that we have in astrotourism in chile and it's a big challenge to change this i can tell you a little more about what is going on in this discussion what is our vision the one that we developed at the national strategy and i'm sorry to say for all people that are not chileans in the audience but we put as our vision that chile will be considered the best astro tourism destination i'm sorry portugal i'm sorry namibia in the world due to the quality diversity and sustainability of the experiences it offers to its visitors this is a an amazing sculpture a very big one that is in the middle of the desert where people gathered there to take photos of the night sky and whatever it i will tell you a brief idea about our main goals in this strategy because it gives you some idea about which are the main challenges or gaps i was talking about quality and i said that poor experience design means poor quality so we had some some some goals on quality levels another one's on guides that for them to be better prepared better trained a to have more diverse a experienced offers for tourists to choose considering positioning we put put our goal that astrotourism will be one of the five main activities carried out by foreign visitors that means like well wine and skiing are possibly two the two better known and and nature and some nature tourism sustainability that means to the su to succeed in some effective dark skies protection and there are a lot of things happening there's a discussion of a new law these days going on here we propose to triple our visits a year and to multiply the income for a at least for four okay i will not get into details i will just mention you that we developed like 60 we and they were designed in quite a detailed way 60 initiatives in seven strategic areas that covered visitors experience human resources infrastructure equipment and resources sustainability marketing coordination and some other high visibility or iconic actions that were a little bit related to marketing what has happened since in 2016 when when we developed this uh the first vid well what how has the roadmap being executed i must say that in concerning like a it's a it's coordination or whom has taken responsibility of this plan a main responsibility has been assumed by regional governments that's like a state government in not not our national government mostly from kokimbo where eva robin the observatory is being built la silla gemini south et cetera and antofagasta where where there are paranal alma the extremely large telescope and so on and that and very unfortunately in my opinion coordination at the national level has been abandoned i mean in theory there is one person in charge of this at a governmental body but they're really and they say that they're they're not being followed so so this strategy is like regions are taking parts of it and they're trying to do their best and so on yeah the main executive the main initiatives that has been executed or are being executed are related to experience design and guide training that's that's good news this for instance is some kind of experience design workshops that we have been conducting i'm speaking sorry i'm my firm has also gotten engaged on this stuff this is this isn't san pedro atacama but we have done and that's a four-month program for developing experience design in with with entrepreneurs small firms we have done some others in the gokimba region also okay main gaps and challenges that we diagnosed at the beginning of the strategy are still pending including what i mentioned about visitor programs to international scientific observatories this we do not have as as the coordination at national level has been abandoned we do not have actualized figures of visitors at a national level however we do have because we we we got involved in some regional program we have some like a kind of a sample of what's going on in one region and we could assume that happens on a national level visitors have increased in the past five years all these numbers are obviously pre-covered they have increased in antofagasta by almost four times they multiply by four all almost a it even slightly bigger has been the the number of providers that have appeared so many small entrepreneurs have appeared 70 of providers are micro they're very very small companies and they will classify as micro firms in in our terms here but that means nine employees or less but i would say that most of them has like three employees or less so that means it an extremely fragile a system and it's very modest astrotourism it's there is a like a a contradiction here because it sounds very sexy very appealing everyone loves the idea in chile but the reality is that it is performed at a very modest level that's a reality and that has been and that has meant as a couple of person of people mentioned before me covet has been devastating for this so many of the people that worked in our workshops and during the past three years i think that i'm i i'm not exaggerating if i say that 60 first percent have run out of business and i mean have they sold their telescopes and they moved into santiago again so that and that has happened to a lot of them i just want to end my presentation sharing a few a few ideas a not just to talk about planning and strategy a i will just give you a brief idea but in our experience having seen what we have seen in chilean and other countries what makes a good astrotourism experience the first thing that i would say is that looking at the sky is not enough and a i'm sorry to say but it we have seen many times that it's if that's just the issue there are a lot of people that will get a little bored after 10 minutes and when you move your telescope and point to another star okay they will go there but the third time they will start to look around what errors what else are they going to do and together with that i will say even if you have powerful telescopes i don't know the experience of each of of of of who was hearing this conference but looking through a telescope can be quite disappointing you will not see very well the image will be very faint very dark the first time you see other tales coming say are you kidding me was this all about and that is especially true because we faced the unfair competition from movies and we have this in our retina and in our memory and we do have it and this is not what we see at the telescope we have we even we even have this for screen savers and we do not see it this in the telescope it what we have seen is that key factors for a good experience for for a good astrotourism experience is experience design is putting together these different issues that like place resources a amputation food drinks seeds a something to keep you warm etc and the other key issue our guides if you have a very good experience design and a very good guide you can have a wonderful astro tourism experience even in a light polluted city well even more in a dark sky place [Music] and in astrotourism experience design key rules are set by tourism so i i love this to be happening in at iau a home because in in this case key rules are not placed by science and that means that things have to be pleasant and fun however for scientists tourism offers science outreach and unbeatable opportunity it offers nothing less that it offers the chance to reach large audiences this is the explainer that is in front of the griffith observatory in the in los angeles it's crowded it's full of people it's full of people that go there because the place is beautiful and there are some wonder wonderful exhibits and when the in the night comes you can see you can gather some star parties that happens on the terrace it well and i would say that if i if the goal of scientists is to provide a meaningful science outreach giving some joy and fun can't be that bad am i right well that's it i i hope it didn't go too long thanks no pablo was uh it was good it was within the time and uh thank you so much for the interesting presentation also providing some very interesting tips how to design a great astro tourism experiences and also we are pre publishing today a manual that you wrote a couple of years ago about how to design disaster tourism experiences and we're going to share the link also with the people that are following us here because i think he's a great guy to get started in astro tourism thank you so much pablo so running a bit late uh we're going to go finally to our last speaker soichi banarji and she's going to give us an outlook on responsible tourism initiative so gee i think the you can start sharing your screen are you there yeah yeah just okay perfect can you see it we can see it uh but we can see all the browser so yeah perfect yeah so thank you so much uh for inviting me here today and um i think iu is doing a doing an absolutely fabulous job of cross-pollinating ideas so congratulations to all of you we can't continue to work in silos and hope to bring any real change and after hearing all of you today i mean if i needed any more convincing i'm absolutely convinced and thank you so much mr alvarez for your wonderful presentation before me because i am a travel journalist and you know i also a responsible tourism consultant i work for an organization called outlook responsible tourism initiative here in india and we are an affiliate member of the unwtu we um support and celebrate tourism that is people friendly and planet friendly across india and south asia and i'm really here to share a few quick thoughts that i had on how i think in the post-vaccine world nature communities and the night sky can create many many more livelihoods and how we can sustain those livelihoods by creating a wider audience for it especially in a country like india where astro tourism or dark sky tourism or whatever you want to call it is still at a rather nascent stage although as you have seen already we've started very well thanks to sona las gotra and her team at global himalayan expedition now uh the pandemic you know has has dominated our lives it has dominated uh headlines it has changed the way we perceive risks and you know over the last few years the last year and a half all the trends and patterns that have emerged um you know just looking at those it's also very clear that it has changed the way we travel one of those many trends that i wanted to quickly pause on because i've been my hopes on it is uh you know is is what i think the kryptonite or the very catalyst for change that many of us in the tourism industry have been waiting for and that is uh the thirst for nature and thirst for open safe spaces um after being i guess you know cooped up in our houses um practicing social distancing so much that it becomes second nature to us it is even after we are vaccinated uh it is going to be a bit difficult for us to walk out into a crowded space and not feel a bit uncomfortable so it will take a while for that to change however as we all know there are a lot of people who are itching to travel uh you and i included um so you know are there are words there are phrases like revenge tourism being banded about and what that really means is that uh travelers want to avenge all the holidays that they've not had in the last year and a half they want to make up for lost time by going for more holidays the question is how do we take this latent demand and stir it in the direction of well sustainable responsible regenerative tourism whatever you'd like to call it but the form of tourism which is um gentler and which is uh more beneficial to the local communities and to the environment which also of course includes dark sky tourism now uh there are a couple of other you know trends that support this larger trend i just wanted to quickly touch upon them one is the fact that there's been um a clear upswing in domestic tourism across the world um people are looking you know people are looking for new experiences in their own backyards they're exploring their own countries and what that means is not only are they discovering new places for the future tourists to come and discover later but they are also taking some of the pressure off the places that are very very popular so um ask me i mean in india um if i had to go back to the taj mahal for the 49th time i don't think i i think i'd take a minute to think about it i would rather go somewhere which was uh you know a little bit further off the city limits so that's fantastic i think the other fantastic thing is that um globally uh 80 percent of the tourism industry is made up of smes and of um you know entrepreneurs or social entrepreneurs and that i think is a huge advantage because as principles of sustainability get more and more mainstreamed um i am absolutely sure that uh you know these entrepreneurs will seize the opportunity and they'll see the business sense of actually adopting and you know developing astro tourism even in countries like india where it's where you know it hasn't really been explored too much as yet but who is the traveler that we are trying to attract i mean who is this traveler that we are trying to steer towards astrotourism steer towards regenerative tourism uh do we even know whether this person uh you know would like to see the night skies do we even know that you know they will make that connection with forest bathing i think hannah was mentoring about the health benefits will they make the connection between sustainability and uh you know personal well-being and personal health and hygiene especially at a time like this well uh we don't know um we don't know what will happen immediately after the pandemic because the human mind is a you know it's a difficult thing to predict but we asked a few people here in india uh in may 2021 and you know this is what they had to see we we reached out to about one five four two respondents across 50 cities in india um and uh you know it was deeply reassuring to see some of the findings that uh you know that the data point suggested one of that of course was the fact that many many people said 88 to be exact said that they were more aware of sustainability now than they were 10 years ago which is a huge win for us because you know it's it's really nascent uh even sustainability is only just uh hitting its stride in india so i think it's fantastic that you know that the travelers are uh that the travelers claim that they are much more aware it was also fantastic to see that a staggering 96 said that they prefer to go to a hotel a homestay or a bnb or a travel operator that claims to be more responsible towards the environment and towards the locals and that they were willing to pay a premium for it so i think we've come a long way and these data points indicate just that they also said that uh you know when they take holidays they go for a travel experience they they prefer it if they have the opportunity to go for a nature walk as well and when they take their children or their families out for holidays especially at a time like this they are looking to expose them to newer experiences to get closer to nature and to uh you know and to experience non-motorized activities so i mean just give me a moment to pause here because just this slide alone is enough to um enough to suggest that something like dark sky tourism something like the dark sky tourism where where community uh communities are leading that leading such initiatives can be absolutely fantastic uh even in a country like india which has not seen very much of this so far but um you know we're talking about communities a lot i you know others have also spoken before me about indigenous communities but uh what what do we mean when we say um you know we'd like to create alternative livelihoods um you know for these communities we'd like to make them resilient we'd like to ensure that you know they have more opportunities all of this is great but who are these communities do we even know them and uh you know my my experience in the last few years has allowed me to be in touch with over 5000 travel organizations that many of whom work with communities so i can tell you this much that in our subcontinent while there's greater expectation on the traveler to go local there's also um much much more pressure on the communities to offer what they're calling authentic experiences and uh that's you know that can be sometimes at odds with the community's own expectations the community's own aspirations and hope and their own individual you know their own sense of you know ideas of individual growth and individual freedom um so you know so how do we address that and i think uh you know they in this day and age when many of them have access to the internet even in rural areas many of them have access to phones the televisions even a motorbike like the kind that you see in this slide right now um how i mean they all want to be at par with their uh you know with their urban counterparts they want to do exactly what they are doing one they want to be on social media but they want to do it from the comfort of their own home close to their families in the rural setting that they've grown up in and how can we provide it to them i think that's where uh dark sky tourism especially the ones uh which are uh you know which are uh going to work with communities will come in will step in and especially for women as we know um at least in our subcontinent stem subjects are not talked to them certainly not at the elementary levels so we want i mean it would be fantastic if we can encourage that you know encourage that to happen and give them uh the possibility of leading better lives in the geographies that they are currently based in of course all of this fits it's all quite in sync with the you know the global road maps that organizations like the world travel and tourism council or the unwto have been drawing up and you know i'm not going to pause too much on this but effectively all they're saying is that tourism can pivot more powerfully from the pandemic and create more livelihoods once again if we prioritize the health of the people and health of the natural world and link it all up with sustainability and um and this again is something that we know very well that tourism has a multiplier effect for local communities so every time that we create one direct job in the tourism sector or whether it's through astrotourism or anything else we are creating three jobs and all and that's really vital both in terms of arresting migration from rural you know communities to mega you know from rural geographies to mega cities and in terms of arresting um cultural erosion which again many of you have touched upon that's something that is um that that until recently nobody would talk about and it's only now that we are reaching out to the elders in the community we are you know talking about um talking about oral histories and documenting that and that would be fantastic if we can do that as well in the context of astronomy i mean sonal just talked about um the himalayas i mean the silk route passed through that area there is so much uh you know that we can learn from them so many stories that are waiting to be told and i think there is a captive audience for it um all of us are travellers i mean for a moment if you just forget that i'm a journalist you're an astronomer all of us are travellers at the heart of it right so um think about it we are we are based out of urban areas and uh we love to travel but um you know in when we are in our own homes when we are in urban settings we usually have some form of entertainment that we rely on right with a walk to the pub a quick dinner at a restaurant or you know watching netflix in the times of the pandemic um really i mean whatever we do uh we have some form of entertainment so many of us not everybody but many of the people who are only beginning to discover let's say something like astrotourism will want something to do and you know over the years we've been trying to dissuade them from sitting around bonfires because in many places like ladakh for instance uh wood is scarce and you know we we rather we'd rather that they opted for other opportunities like walking safaris at night the kind that ben spoke off you know or owl night jar moth walks which are guided or in india very often if you are lucky you get invited to weddings and of course there are festivals and local fairs through the year but even as i say that i i have to you know have to maybe tweak it a little bit to say that they asked for addict i mean there are festivals and fairs at different points in the year but the night sky is there through the year and i think that is a fantastic opportunity there are many many places in the subcontinent for instance which are uh which have low humidity places like the thar desert uh the you know the the ladakh which is a cold desert then we have the range shadow areas in spiti and so on there are many many such places where astrotourism can be developed and where we can work with local communities to ensure that we create ecosystems like the ones that dhe has created that are automated now finally i just wanted to quickly draw a few parallel connections with bird watching and uh because i think that there are many commonalities bird watching uh you know both in terms of the profile of the bird watcher and in terms of the trajectory that the bird watching tourism industry has taken over the last couple of decades it would be interesting to see how astro tourism can perhaps take a few you know take a few pages out of their book really because think about it who are the you know who are i mean bird watching is one of the i think many of you probably know this already so i'm you know stating the obvious but bird watching is one of the fastest growing um you know sub segments of nature based tourism uh it's grown by 300 percent in some markets and in the u.s alone it's valued at about 40 billion a year uh but it's not about volumes it's about the kind of uh traveler that the bird watching industry attracts so you know if you just think about it there are i think about four kinds of travelers that they attract one is the casual traveler um which also includes people who are doing it for the very first time including children who are fantastic even for astrotourism uh then there are of course the amateur bird watchers and the uh you know hobbyists then there are bird photographers who want that fantastic shot which is no different from astrophotographers right and finally there are the hardcore bird watchers or like your hardcore astronomers who are there for astral events and really all they want is um you know fantastic dark skies and a safe uh comfortable bed to uh you know turn into when the night is over and the sun rises but um really i mean i think um even in terms of bird watching there are a few other very important points but i'm just going to talk about the fact that bird watching seasons don't necessarily coincide with tourism seasons they um sometimes in some geographies they you can watch birds all through the year and in fact that's that's true for most geographies so i think that could be true for astrotourism as well and if we can spread out uh you know travelers through the year i think it will take a huge amount of pressure of really really fragile um ecosystems where astrotourism can be practiced to begin with right you can't go to a place where um you know these are all places that that are already quite fragile so um so yeah i mean that's that's all that i really wanted to say i think um we need all of you to help us out um to marry the best that we have in community-based tourism with what we know about astronomy and ensure that uh we can you know we can we can deliver a certain quality of experience to the traveler because like i said the first three travelers whether it's the casual bird watcher the casual astronomer the uh hobbyist or the uh you know astrophotographer these people may be easier to please in some cases if you if you figure out the logistics but how do you please the please please the astronomers who are there for really serious reasons so we have to be able to please all of them and and i think that's where the future lies so i'm really hoping all of us all of you can help us and thank you so much for listening thank you so much thank you so much for your presentation also for bringing it together you know with a different perspective and and also an interesting perspective from other fields so of course as you all know we are running a bit late there was a lot of interesting discussion happening on youtube a lot of interesting feedback at the time we had more than 200 people following us which is really interesting so what we're going to do we're going to send an email to everyone at register at this event we're going to try to share as many presentations as possible depending how the the the speakers will be available or not to share the presentations we also we're gonna collect a bunch of links that we have so everyone can actually be informed and involved with future activities as you know astro tourism especially astro tourism for social economical development of local communities is one of the flagship projects of the iau office of astronomy for development and we're going to also ask you to then register on a mailing list so you can be more informed about the ongoing activities so i think i'm going to then go directly to the closing words and closing remarks i'm going to ask professor ivin van the iau international astronomical union president to say a few words for closing his workshop are you there yes i'm here thank you okay can you yes can you see me yeah we cannot let me see now i think we'll be able to see you because i just want to put on spotlight okay there you are there we go go ahead okay good i thought i put a beautiful night sky behind me so thank you so much pedro thank you so much he wrote uh ram for for organizing this this meeting has been a fascinating two hours beautiful presentations um normally this time of year i'm actually camping in the western us and seeing these beautiful skies above me so when several of you started your talks with your own experiences that certainly resonated with me as well both in colorado and california but also in chile i mean the beautiful skies in chile just the vlt site it's one of the most beautiful um places to see the to see the southern uh see the southern sky so um we've heard uh a number of great talks and thank you all for participating uh in that um clearly so much is happening already in extra tourism and i i knew some of it was happening but not actually the extent of it especially in some countries we've heard about japan the soraa experience from organization from akatasan the game reserves um beautiful combination nature the the big animals with the big sky uh portugal um i really want to go there now i know that i've seen the the pictures uh india the himalaya expedition is one of the the highlights of the oad platforms that we've had and of course chile has so much potential um and i i think there's really a potential to grow they're very significantly um so to come back to steve pompeo's first initial talk because it was a great talk and i can recommend everybody i think now that we've heard sort of the full scope to go back to that talk because i mentioned as he mentioned so much is happening already and and where do we fit in as as astronomers and also as the iau um where is our niche um so i think several of you confirmed that sort of the dark sky tourism so not necessarily everything or say space tourism but the dark sky tourism is really the niche for us to be in um the eco-tourism reconnecting this nature was mentioned several times and also then the cultural the educational aspects that are there it's great to see already several handbooks i was impressed by the south african training that is there and even the exam that they have to do very good because indeed high quality guides is going to be key here um but also in mental well-being that was mentioned so many people no no need this recharging i needed myself and the recharging just in nature um from our busy for my busy lives and it's good to see that there are surveys that there's research being done into this so so there's a lot of material already um but um i think what uh steve also mentioned was uh it needs to be principled ecotourism total quality management i think are the words that he used the obligations to local people as sonal said you cannot just simply parachute in um you need to basically do this holistic development with the communities in order to make it work and to make it work in a sustainable way and i think that is a very important point to keep in mind in everything that we're doing and i'm glad to see that the tourist industry is thinking along the same lines now so where do we go from here do we do we go really to a society for a new society for astro tourism um you know the case seems easy to make with the examples we have today um but we have to keep sort of the swot analysis uh in mind uh both the the the advantage that we already have the of opportunities and but also the potential pitfalls and the threats and also where does the ieu fit in um the iu actually has as part of its mission the protection of the dark and quiet skies um we have just done that through conferences through a big book that also has a chapter on dark sky oasis so we're very much aware of the importance that all of you are doing in protecting the dark skies through these sky oasis we've also have a branch in the the oid in terms of our flagship the social economic development the himalaya again as one of our pilot projects and so that's another angle and then there's the angle of the education and because certainly helped how you can certainly help is writing these handbooks and keeping the education part uh up to speed so um this is sort of i think where we need to go from here i think this has been a fantastic workshop to to get sort of a lot of things on the table and now we need to to think how we go from here we need to think big i i agree this uh um steve in that respect um but some of the experiences can also be rather simple you know maybe we don't need a whole experience as the lodi park that was planned in new new mexico maybe just a simple minimal telescope question is how minimal is already enough maybe you just need well people which storytelling is very important um and having an experience surrounding it so so this is something to to to further discuss and and to go from there and also then if we go out for money um how do we you know what do we really what is our our vision of what we want to um get in the end the the experience of partnering with other [Music] industries like the watch experiences is a very interesting one um given some of the similarities the day within versus tonight so i i think i want to end here by again congratulating um everybody and thanking them for their contributions i think we've learned a lot today and i look forward to taking it from here and see how we can go either to a society or something else in the in the next um in the next months i mean i hope we don't wait too much sort of the next meeting that i think we need to build on this momentum that we've gathered now and move try to move forward from here so thank you very much again thank you vienna thank you for your words and i guess that's it uh we're gonna close the youtube streaming now and thank you once again for attending and to all all our speakers for the fantastic talks thank you

Channel: Leiden Science - Universiteit Leiden

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Length: 152min 30sec (9150 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 28 2021