Over the decades as more and more of our populations take to the outdoors, there is a sudden increase in demands on outdoor locations for either holiday, adventure or extreme activities (that were accessible to only a select few with special skills in the past). Social media uploads of activities make some challenges seem easy and therefore more people are motivated to take these up. This is good for the most part for reasons of tourism, livelihood and adventure development but has brought out some challenges to the forefront.
As accessibility to locations and gear get easy day by day, thereby growing concerns on awareness of people taking up activities and respect for the challenges involved, sustainability of the activity, location impacts in various respects, etc. There is a need for safety and a mechanism for controlled growth to ensure and respect the carrying capacity of each location. All these along with environment impact assessment is becoming important as climate change and landscape concerns increase.
Fortunately there have been good developments in best practices in all the above areas globally. The key now is to take these and apply to OUTDOORS and adventures holistically to build sustainable governance around it. This should help everyone come to appreciate the great value outdoors continue to provide. We also need ensure implementation and engagement is simple and robust for all stakeholders.
Given some exposure globally to businesses – private and government, NGO’s, Wildlife and Conservation, Climate change and sustainability over the past 3 decades, this is my attempt to help systematically define an eco-system of the OUTDOORS and adventures. This should help all stake holders understand and appreciate details of each entity and its inter-linkages. It can then be used as a model to achieve the above goals in a structured manner.
I sincerely appreciate feedbacks to make this worthwhile! Many Thanks and let’s come together to help make the OUTDOORS better!!
An initiative to apply TGO to adventures community in India has been in review since 2020 with a team of close colleagues – Shantanu Pandit, Ratnesh Jhaveri, and Divyesh Muni. More on this soon.
Bhushan H. Sethi 
