Walk on the Wild Side: Estimating the Global Magnitude of Visits to Protected Areas
By A. Balmford, Jonathan M. H. Green, M. Anderson, J. Beresford, Charles Huang, R. Naidoo, M. Walpole, Andrea Manica. PLoS Biology, 2015
720 citations recorded by the source corpus.
How often do people visit the world’s protected areas (PAs)? Despite PAs covering one-eighth of the land and being a major focus of nature-based recreation and tourism, we don’t know. To address this, we compiled a globally-representative database of visits to PAs and built region-specific models predicting visit rates from PA size, local population size, remoteness, natural attractiveness, and national income. Applying these models to all but the very smallest of the world’s terrestrial PAs suggests that together they receive roughly 8 billion (8 x 109) visits/y—of which more than 80% are in Europe and North America. Linking our region-specific visit estimates to valuation studies indicates that these visits generate approximately US $600 billion/y in direct in-country expenditure and US $250 billion/y in consumer surplus. These figures dwarf current, typically inadequate spending on conserving PAs. Thus, even without considering the many other ecosystem services that PAs provide to people, our findings underscore calls for greatly increased investment in their conservation.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/91abbe635af40e813651b489b65e297e46e2b302
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In Global and Planetary Change
Citations in the corpus
- The ecological impact of humans and dogs on wildlife in protected areas in eastern North America (2016, background): “From 2012 to 2013, 376 trained volunteers deployed 1951 unbaited camera traps across 33 protected areas (15 hunted, 18 not hunted) in the Southeastern United States (Fig.”
- Consequences of brown bear viewing tourism : A review (2017, background): “8 billion visits per year, which generates around US $600 billion annually in direct in-country expenditure and US $250 billion in consumer surplus (Balmford et al., 2015).”