Abstract
Tourism relies on biodiversity for ecological stability, yet actively contributes to its loss through carbon-intensive practices and extractive governance. This contradiction reveals a central tension: conservation, when institutionalised through tourism, risks becoming a mode of governance that legitimises ecological harm by rendering degradation productive. This chapter advances a critical argument: biodiversity must be understood not as a neutral ecological asset but as a politically charged terrain through which climate injustice is structured and sustained. It begins by unpacking the conceptual instability of biodiversity, showing how technocratic logics in tourism simplify ecological complexity, commodify life, and frame degradation as a governable trade-off. These logics underpin offsetting regimes and free-riding behaviours that enable high-emitting actors to externalise harm. Biodiversity loss, when managed through carbon-centric mechanisms, becomes a strategy of crisis governance that preserves the status quo. In response, this chapter examines regenerative tourism as a provisional biopolitical experiment-an attempt to reorganise the governance of life through participatory restoration and Indigenous ethics. Drawing on the case of Aotearoa New Zealand, the chapter considers how this approach may interrupt extractive logics. Justice, in this context, demands not symbolic sustainability but a structural rethinking of how tourism governs vulnerability, responsibility, and ecological futures.