Taking Root: Balancing Socotra's Sustainable Development Through Agro-Tourism

Abstract

Post-pandemic tourism has surged, leading to over-tourism, where popular destinations areexperiencing social, economic, and infrastructural displacements. This resistance, as well as the desire for more meaningful travel, has shifted tourists’ desired destinations to those that offer unique cultural experiences and natural beauty, such as the relatively underexplored Socotra, Yemen. While this shift in tourism benefits developing destinations that rely on tourism for their economic generation, like Socotra, it also poses a risk to their social and natural habitats. Unregulated tourism growth in developing regions like the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) threatens natural resources, culture, and local communities. Socotra, Yemen, faces these challenges as its tourism interest grows, particularly due to its designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site and its endemic biodiversity. A balanced approach is necessary to ensure the island’s sustainable development, addressing both pre-tourism efforts, such as enhancing Socotran hospitality skills, and post-tourism strategies, like preserving its natural conservation zones. Additionally, Socotra’s development model has the potential to set a global standard for sustainable tourism, not only for its provided solutions towards tourism’s current wicked problems but also for its transitional desert climate’s potential to incorporate climate-responsive design, ethical material sourcing, and thermal comfort strategies within its architectural design. This framework can develop a measurable system in which developing nations in similar cultural and natural climates can balance their tourism benefits with ecological, economic, and social sustainability, in a replicable design that can be modified depending on each nation’s programmatic demand.