Posters being viewed by the participants.

The proposed project builds on the previous project, which assessed and analysed the identified threat “Tourism” in Red panda habitats of Darjeeling Himalayas. The project came up with an explicit understanding of the challenges to sustainable and responsible nature tourism in red panda habitats of Singhalila landscape. With these understandings, this project now proposes to work on some of the key challenges through further research, as well as actions. Hence the project proposes to further assess tourism in Red Panda habitats in two other mountain parks of Neora Valley National Park in Darjeeling and in Barsey Rhododendron Sanctuary in Sikkim Himalayas. Inadequate regulatory frameworks, inadequate interpretation including poor capacity of nature guides rendering low levels of visitor satisfaction and education on the conservation value of the region were some of the key challenges out of the 10 identified in Singhalila.

The project therefore will follow up on the capacity building of local guides which is already underway and with appropriately designed activities, will upgrade interpretation in Singhalila. Moreover all these protected areas under study are transboundary in nature sharing borders with either Nepal or Bhutan. The information generated here therefore would also feed into transboundary tourism guidelines at a regional level.