Sustainable tourism

Sustainable tourism is the concept of visiting a place as a tourist and trying to make only a positive impact on the environment, society and economy. Tourism can involve primary transportation to the general location, local transportation, accommodations, entertainment, recreation, nourishment and shopping. It can be related to travel for leisure, business and what is called VFR (visiting friends and relatives). There is now broad consensus that tourism development should be sustainable; however, the question of how to achieve this remains an object of debate.

Without travel there is no tourism, so the concept of sustainable tourism is tightly linked to a concept of sustainable mobility. Two relevant considerations are tourism's reliance on fossil fuels and tourism's effect on climate change. 72 percent of tourism's CO₂ come from transportation, 24 percent from accommodations, and 4 percent from local activities.Aviation accounts for 55% of those transportation CO₂ emissions (or 40% of tourism's total). However, when considering the impact of all greenhouse gas emissions from tourism and that aviation emissions are made at high altitude where their effect on climate is amplified, aviation alone accounts for 75% of tourism's climate impact.

Music of Kiribati

The music of Kiribati has been less affected by Western culture than most other Pacific island cultures since Europeans did not arrive in Kiribati until 1892. The national anthem of Kiribati is "Teirake kaini Kiribati" (Stand Kiribati), by Uriam Uriam; it was adopted upon independence in 1979.

Kiribati folk music is generally based on chanting or other forms of vocalizing, accompanied by body percussion. Public performances in modern Kiribati are generally performed by a seated chorus, accompanied by a guitar. However, during formal performances of the standing dance (Te Kaimatoa) or the hip dance (Te Buki) a wooden box is used as a percussion instrument. This box is constructed so as to give a hollow and reverberating tone when struck simultaneously by a chorus of men sitting around it. Traditional songs are often love-themed, but there are also competitive, religious, children's, patriotic, war and wedding songs. There are also stick dances (which accompany legends and semi-historical stories. These stick dances or 'tirere' (pronounced seerere) are only performed during major festivals.

Kiribati

Coordinates: 1°25′N 173°00′E / 1.417°N 173.000°E / 1.417; 173.000

Kiribati (/ˌkɪrɪˈbæs/; KEER-ə-bahss or /ˌkɪrɪˈbɑːti/; KEER-ə-BAH-tee), officially the Republic of Kiribati (Gilbertese: Ribaberiki Kiribati), is an island nation in the central Pacific Ocean. The nation comprises 33 atolls and reef islands and one raised coral island; Banaba. They have a total land area of 800 square kilometres (310 sq mi) and are dispersed over 3.5 million square kilometres (1,351,000 square miles). Their spread straddles the equator and the International Date Line, although the Date Line is indented to bring the Line Islands in the same day as the Kiribati Islands. The permanent population is just over 100,000 (2011), half of whom live on Tarawa Atoll.

Kiribati became independent from the United Kingdom in 1979. The capital and now most populated area, South Tarawa, consists of a number of islets, connected by a series of causeways. These comprise about half the area of Tarawa Atoll.

Kiribati is a member of the Commonwealth of Nations, the IMF and the World Bank, and became a full member of the United Nations in 1999.

Kiribati (disambiguation)

Kiribati may refer to:

See also

Gilbertese language

Taetae ni Kiribati or Gilbertese, also Kiribati (sometimes Kiribatese), is a Micronesian language of the Austronesian language family. It has a basic verb–object–subject word order.

Name

The word Kiribati is the modern rendition for "Gilberts", so the name is not usually translated into English. "Gilberts" comes from Captain Thomas Gilbert, who, along with Captain John Marshall, was one of the first Europeans to visit the Gilbert Islands in 1788. Some of the islands had been sighted or visited earlier, including by Commodore John Byron, whose ships happened on Nikunau in 1765. Frequenting of the islands by Europeans and Chinese dates from whaling and oil trading from the 1820s, when no doubt Europeans learnt to speak it, as I-Kiribati learnt to speak English and other languages foreign to them. However, it wasn't until Hiram Bingham II took up missionary work on Abaiang in the 1860s that the language began to take on the written form known today. For example, Bingham was the first to translate the Bible into Gilbertese, and wrote several hymn books, dictionaries and commentaries in the language of the Gilbert Islands.