Attitudes of local people towards the Guassa Community Eco-Lodge in Menz-Gera Midir District, North Shewa Administrative Zone, Ethiopia

In recent decades, several eco–lodges have been established in biodiversity rich areas of Ethiopia. For example, plenty of eco–lodges were built in Amhara, Oromia and Southern Nation, Nationalities and People’s National Regional States. Most eco–lodges are primarily established and managed to provide visiting tourists with various facilities, such as bed rooms, restaurants, transport services (e.g. boats, horses, and mules), camping sites, natural picnic areas and guiding service to trek on foot and ride on horse/mule backs.1 In return, eco–lodge owners charge the tourists and collect revenue for the facilities they have rendered. The federal and the respective regional governments also earn money by collecting taxes from the owners of the eco–lodges. In addition, eco–lodges create job opportunities to the local people because the eco–lodge owners hire both permanent and temporary workers. Local people can also earn money by providing guiding services or selling souvenirs to the arriving tourists.2 Most of the times, as eco–lodges are built from environmentally friendly, economically feasible and socially acceptable local materials, we argue that eco–lodges contribute to the conservation of the local biodiversity.3–6 As biodiversity is one of the top most attractions to tourists, eco–lodges conserve the local biodiversity from human and livestock induced disturbances. For example, when natural plants existing in the compounds of eco–lodges are reasonably protected from illegal human– and livestock–induced encroachments, they attract plenty of wild mammal and bird species from the adjacent open fields. This is because they provide the incoming wild mammal and bird species with quality food,7,8 suitable cover from environmental extremes,9 breeding sites10 and concealment from risk of predation.11 Therefore, to maintain the long term survival of our natural ecosystems, eco–lodges play a central role in local biodiversity conservation.2–6 We also illustrated how eco–lodges are linked with biodiversity conservation and socioeconomic development in Figure 1.