Douro wine-tourism engaging consumers in nature conservation stewardship: An immersive biodiversity experience

Abstract

Wine tourism is a growing revenue side-stream for wine businesses and regions. It complements wine with a context of landscape, gastronomy, culture and history. Wine tourism generates an experience that transcends the material nature of wine. In 2022, the UN will hold the COP15 of the Convention for Biological Diversity (CBD) aiming to reverse nature and biodiversity loss, making the world nature- positive by 2030 and planning for full recovery by 2050. Wine tourism develops the engagement of consumers with wine in its intangible dimensions enriching the experience offer with a further field: biodiversity and nature stewardship. We propose wine tourism may be used to educate consumers about the need to protect nature, ecosystem and biodiversity of those places where wine is produced and the global sustainability benefits that may be derived from that protection. We created a wine tourism offer package for a biodiversity trail set in a 70-hectare vineyard in Douro, a UNESCO world heritage site. In this work, we describe how scientific information was used to create the trail elements and educational information, to engage consumers as nature conservancy stewards and advocates.