The National Geographic/Ashoka Changemakers Geotourism Challenge: Celebrating Places/Changing Lives seeks innovations that use tourism to help sustain, enhance, or preserve local culture and environment. The goal of the Geotourism Challenge is to identify and showcase innovators - individuals and organisations - that support the approach known as geotourism: tourism that sustains or enhances the geographical character of a place - its environment, culture, aesthetics, heritage, and the well-being of its residents. The competition was launched on Changemakers.net where the sponsors collect the solutions of geotourism innovators and ask that they be debated and improved upon by all who are interested in accessing the website.

The competition is intended to help entrants find resources, including new ideas, collaborative partners, and investors. It is inviting nominations, entries, comments for the online discussion, and voting for three winners chosen from the finalists, available on the website starting on May 28 2008.

The deadline for nomination is March 19 2008; the entry deadline is April 16 2008.

Click here for more information.

Click here to nominate a location.


Click here for contest guidelines.