Walk on the wild side: estimating the global magnitude of visits to protected areas

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...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PLoS biology 2015-02, Vol.13 (2), p.e1002074-e1002074
Main Authors: Balmford, Andrew, Green, Jonathan M H, Anderson, Michael, Beresford, James, Huang, Charles, Naidoo, Robin, Walpole, Matt, Manica, Andrea
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Biodiversity
Conservation of Natural Resources - economics
Conservation of Natural Resources - statistics & numerical data
Data collection
Economic aspects
Ecosystem
Ecosystems
Environmental protection
Estimates
Europe
Forests
Humans
Management
Models, Statistical
National parks
North America
Parks & recreation areas
Population
Protected areas
Recreation - economics
Recreation - psychology
Socioeconomic factors
Tourism
Travel - economics
Travel - psychology
Travel - statistics & numerical data
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Summary: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.
ISSN:1545-7885
1544-9173
1545-7885
DOI:10.1371/journal.pbio.1002074