In September 2000, the Total Corporate Foundation and SCOPE (Scientific Committee On Problems of Environment), jointly organised the first Port-Cros Conference on "Tourism and Biodiversity". The main aim of the conference was to discuss how sustainable development could be tied to tourism particularly for islands and coastlines that are usually the prime money spinner for this line of business.

What's novel about this conference is that it offers stakeholders an opportunity of pooling the experience and resources of experts from many walks of life such as scientists specialising in ecology, biology and economists, experts and consultants that work for and with UN agencies such as the WTO (World Tourism Organisation) in addition to development specialists and tourism operators in a bid to foster a seminal debate on an emerging science: sustainable tourism.

Besides, this conference also fuelled a significant debate in addition to enhancing ways and means of collecting information, sparking cross-fertilisation and facilitating information dissemination and in so doing paving the way for closer co-operation for the stakeholders in the field of sustainable tourism and how to develop it. Finally, the conference produced a book on "Tourism, Biodiversity and Information" (published by Francesco Di Castri and Venkataraman Balaji) as more food for thought, debate and awareness sparking on the new science called sustainable tourism.

This event had positive impact at international level, triggering a number of initiatives worldwide, particularly in Polynesia, India and South America. The symposium also provided input for the ongoing debate within the World Tourism Organization on how to define the different types of tourism involving biodiversity and cultural diversity heritage, which is itself linked to the information and communication technologies that are used to valorise that heritage. Last but not least, the Port-Cros symposium contributed to promoting sustainable development in line with the Eco-tourism Summit in Quebec in May 2002 and the Johannesburg Summit in September the same year.