Vast areas were destroyed by a fire that forced the closure of Chile’s Torres del Paine National Park between December 29, 2011, and January 4, 2012, and caused permanent environmental damage in one of the most beautiful places in the world. Unfortunately, it was not the first time that a fire has started as a result of a tourist’s irresponsible conduct.

If you want to see great apes in the wild, Sumatra’s rainforest is one of the most accessible places to do just that. Seeing orangutans in the wild, along with silver Thomas leaf monkeys, pig-tailed macaques, and a diverse range of birds like hornbills, will leave you with a renewed appreciation for the beauty and ingenuity of other species.

Maliau Basin is one of the world’s finest remaining wilderness areas. It encompasses over 390 square kilometres of pristine rainforest in the south-central part of Sabah, Borneo, in Malaysia. The rainforest is so dense that less than 50 percent of it has ever been explored. Today, the Maliau is awaiting UNESCO World Heritage Site status.

“Load up quick, bad weather, come very quick!” These are the last words you ever want to hear when you are a passenger in a tiny 20-seater plane flying into the rainforest. As the engines whirred into life, I wondered for a split second whether or not I’d bought enough supplies to last a trek to the nearest village should the plane crash. Risky or not, the flight into the interior of Sarawak only served to highlight the nature of the trip that was to come – remote and, at this point, reckless.

No fewer than 1.6 billion people — nearly a quarter of the world’s population — depend on forests for their livelihoods. Forests are also critical to maintaining biodiversity, mitigating climate change and enabling key ecosystem functions that regulate the biosphere. And yet about 45 per cent of the world’s forests have already been cleared. Here are some hard numbers to ponder that tell us how and why we should stop.

Mole National Park, Ghana’s largest protected ecosystem, is surrounded by nearly 30 indigenous rural communities that rely on the land for their livelihood. Addressing these fringe communities’ livelihood concerns is an important part of the work done in the area by one tour company, M&J Travel and Tours, committed to ecotourism in Ghana. It currently works with more than 350 women to support the local shea-butter production efforts for commercial trade.

Living in the remote mountains around Luang Namtha in northern Laos, the country’s most traditional ethnic groups have for centuries cultivated rice and inhabited small rural villages. These tribes, however, are at a crossroads between traditional ways of life and the forces of modernity and tourism. In response, the Traditional Arts and Ethnography Centre (TAEC) provides information to travellers about Laos’ diversity of cultures and ethnic groups.