Over the last decade, nature-based tourism has become increasingly popular. In total, wildlife tourism now supports nearly 22 million jobs around the world and contributes more than $120 billion to global GDP.
This growing interest in wildlife tourism, and the economic benefits that come along with it, can change community attitudes towards conservation. Without tourism, local communities may merely view wild animals as a danger to their farms and families, and only value natural resources for consumption. But when animals and natural areas bring tourism dollars and jobs to their community, it can help residents see the importance of keeping their natural assets intact and healthy.
Tourism does contribute to conservation
In Rewa, Guyana, poor job security led villagers to illegally harvest and trade wild animals. As a result, wildlife species such as arapaimas, giant river turtles, and giant otters were beginning to disappear. In 2005, the village opened a community-run eco lodge to improve livelihoods while protecting its ecological diversity. By employing community members as sport fishing guides and boat captains, the lodge allows villagers to maintain rainforest-based livelihoods without causing damage to the ecosystem. Thanks to tourism, arapaimas, turtles, and otters are now common in the Rewa River. Not to mention, visitors contribute far more money to the local economy than wildlife exploitation did. In fact, research shows that globally wildlife tourism is 5x more lucrative than illegal wildlife trade!
Tourism can also provide a compelling incentive for governments and organizations to institute environmental policies and conservation measures. This includes the creation of national parks, nature reserves, and other protected areas to preserve their biodiversity and correspondingly boost their tourism appeal.
Mountain gorillas are another species that has benefited from tourism-motivated conservation policies. These endangered apes can only be found in Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In Uganda, gorilla trekking permits start at $600 and the economic value of gorilla tourism is estimated to be as much as $34.3 million. This has led to policies and strategies that support conservation, such as veterinary interventions, intensive law enforcement, community conservation projects, regulated ecotourism, and transboundary collaboration among government institutions and NGOs. Thanks to these efforts, the number of gorillas within the Virunga Mountain region rose from 240 in the 1980s to 604 in 2016. Now they are the only wild ape population whose numbers are increasing!
Carbon offsetting is another way that individuals and businesses can contribute to environmental conservation projects, while also mitigating their own emissions. Luxury tour operator TCS World Travel, for instance, partners with Sustainable Travel International to offset the carbon emissions generated by their jet trips. Through this partnership, TCS supports the Madre de Dios project which protects critical rainforest habitat and endangered species in the Peruvian Amazon.
At its best, eco-tourism is responsible travel to natural areas that safeguards the integrity of the ecosystem and produces economic benefits for local communities that can encourage conservation. At the nexus of population and the environment, eco-tourism is a creative way of marrying the goals of ecological conservation and economic development.
Threatened species survive largely in parks; parks need money to remain operational; and some of that money comes from tourism. Therefore, tourism contributes to the conservation of these species in parks. We calculate here what proportions of remaining global populations of IUCN-redlisted mammal species effectively depend on tourism revenue. That is, we use the number of individual living animals, ie the sizes of remaining wild populations, as a basic metric or currency of in-situ conservation success; and we use the proportions of parks agency budgets derived from tourism revenue as a measure of tourism contributions. We find that tourism now contributes significantly to the survival of many red-listed mammal species. This reliance on tourism, however, now places their survival at risk from externally generated downturns in tourism.
Here we quantify these risks by calculating the numbers and hence the proportions of remaining individuals that rely on tourism revenue for conservation in parks. We acknowledge that the political and financial dynamics of individual protected areas, as well as the population dynamics and conservation measures for individual species, are often highly complex. Sources of parks funding, however, are largely substitutable: parks agencies incur both conservation and recreation management expenditures irrespective of income, and funds are reallocated internally. At global scale, therefore, the simple accounting approach adopted here provides a valid mechanism to measure the reliance of red-listed mammal species on tourism revenue.
Arguably, the conservation values of one living individual of different threatened species are not equal, but inversely proportional to total remaining global populations. We could calculate a more complex conservation currency where individuals of different species are weighted according to relative rarity, but this would be less robust than the simpler metric adopted here. Alternatively, we could potentially use a probabilistic rather than an accounting model, calculating how support from tourism increases survival probabilities for each subpopulation, and thus for the species overall. This is not yet feasible, because of uncertainties over raw data [28], controversy over minimum viable population sizes [29], improvements in captive breeding and relocation [30], and rapid changes in contributions of tourism to parks revenues. We found no correlation between T and the recently-developed SAFE index [27], which examines the relationship between minimum viable populations and global population sizes for different species.
Our second set of findings relates to the role of tourism revenue contributions to conservation of threatened bird species occurring at least in part within protected areas. Our results identify 41 species where at least 10% of each global population relies on tourism revenue. Naturally, these calculations are also subject to limitations in the scope, accuracy and reliability of financial data in the budgets of protected area agencies. Only a few countries produce and publish transparent, timely and externally audited annual financial statements for their protected area agencies that distinguish different revenue sources. Therefore, if anything, our findings underestimate the importance of tourism revenue for threatened birds in protected areas. When financial data become available for more protected area networks in more countries, a revised analysis would potentially identify a greater number of threatened species that are dependent on tourism revenues.
Despite these shortcomings in detailed data, our findings are broad and robust enough to demonstrate the important role of tourism in funding the conservation of threatened bird species. This reflects changing patterns in protected area funding more generally, over recent decades. Globally, government budget allocations are still the principal source of protected area management funds [13], [21]. However, many protected area agencies increasingly rely on tourism revenues to supplement or replace government allocations (Table 2) [19]. Tourism thus contributes to the conservation of threatened bird species, especially in developing nations with high biodiversity.
The broad accounting approach taken here simply quantifies the degree to which tourism to protected areas contributes to funding conservation of threatened bird species. A number of more detailed or sophisticated approaches may also be feasible. 1. Differentiation by land tenure, distinguishing public, communal and private lands. 2. An accounting approach which calculates net contributions [45], allowing for negative environmental impacts [27], [28] as well as positive conservation measures, and distinguishing high-impact park-based mass tourism from low-impact park-based nature tourism. 3. A more detailed approach which relies on ecological modelling rather than purely on accounting. 4. A narrower focus, on the bird-watching or avitourism subsector specifically, as below.
African nations have a right to, and should, develop and prosper, and discussion of these examples should in no way be construed to suggest otherwise. I provide these case studies to illustrate how economic growth and development is reshaping the African environment and that the conservation of important areas of habitat, even in national parks where photo-tourism is the dominant wildlife use, can no longer be taken for granted to the degree it once was.
The primary economic incentives for habitat conservation are derived via revenue-sharing agreements between rural communities, private enterprise, and conservation agencies and from direct payments to private landowners. For example, in Zimbabwe, under the Communal Areas Management Program for Indigenous Resources (CAMPFIRE), rural communities lease hunting and other tourism rights to commercial outfitters. The communities are then paid 50 percent of the revenues generated by the tourism activity. These revenues are required to be redirected to wildlife conservation and community development programs.
Trophy hunting and photo-tourism are not interchangeable. While photo-tourism generally occupies a larger share of African tourism economies than does trophy hunting, the aforementioned development projects in the national parks of three countries illustrates that photo-tourism is not superior to trophy hunting in terms of providing incentives for conservation in contemporary Africa.
Photo-tourism is also not inferior to trophy hunting. Rather, the two are critical partners in generating public interest, capital, and economic incentives to conserve African ecosystems and wildlife. Working in concert they help to deliver wildlife and ecosystem conservation at a landscape scale in ways that leverage the relative economic viability of each activity in a given place. Trophy hunting is well suited to conserve remote areas that are less scenic and lack the infrastructure and wildlife population densities that typically characterize national parks and other areas best suited for photo-tourism. 2ff7e9595c
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