Ecotourism may be just as environmentally damaging as traditional travel due to the greenhouse gases vacationers are burning to reach remote and pristine areas, industry experts warned Tuesday.

That dilemma has been the focus of the Global Ecotourism Conference in Oslo, a three-day gathering of ecotourism officials struggling to chart the future of an industry whose success threatens to become its own undoing.

“There is no other industry that has more to gain or to lose from climate change,” said Alexi Huntley, whose tiny Costa Rican airline Nature Air claims to be the first with zero net carbon dioxide emissions.

Ecotourism — a form of travel to pristine areas like natural parks or exotic islands meant to avoid the damaging impact of traditional tourism — is growing at around three times the rate of the tourism industry as a whole, according to The International Ecotourism Society, one of the sponsors of the conference.

Yet the extensive travel often required to reach untouched natural wonders produces climate-damaging greenhouses gases and other environmental damage. That, in turn, could potentially dry out the lush national parks and flood the small, exotic islands that are drawing the environmentally minded.

“It’s the Catch-22 of nature-based tourism,” Huntley said.

The roughly 300 delegates were planning to adopt a roadmap for the industry which will stress the need to focus on sustainable tourism.

“Long distance travel — especially air travel — is a challenge to all of us. We know that it has serious impacts on the climate,” said Norwegian Environment Minister Helen Bjoernoey, opening the meeting on Monday.

“The tourist industry should give priority to developing ecotourism in markets closer to home and to promoting environmentally friendly forms of transport.”

According to The International Ecotourism Society, nature-based tourism has been growing at a rate of more than 20 per cent a year since the early 1990s, and is probably growing at three times the rate of the tourism industry as a whole.

“Ecotourism will be especially affected by climate change and all these gloomy predictions,” said Wolfgang Strasdas, a professor of ecotourism at the German University of Applied Sciences in Eberswalde.

Tourism to exotic destinations requires extensive travel, such as long flights and long drives, that scientists say emit climate-warming gases.

“Nature-based tourism requires a lot of travel. There may be six moves in 14 days,” said Huntley, of Nature Air, which seeks to neutralize the climate impact of its flights by investing in such projects as reforestation to rinse carbon dioxide out of the air.

Strasdas said it might seem simplest to just cut out those trips, but that would be disastrous for poor regions and countries that are economically dependent on such tourism.

Instead, a draft statement the meeting is expected to adopt on Wednesday said the ecotourism industry needs to focus on sustainable tourism “that entails responsible travel to natural areas and which conserves the environment and sustains the well-being of local people.”

The conference was sponsored by the ecotourism society, the UN Environment Program, as well as Norwegian and international travel, conservation and environment groups.