TY - JOUR
T1 - Walk on the Wild Side
T2 - Estimating the Global Magnitude of Visits to Protected Areas
AU - Balmford, Andrew
AU - Green, Jonathan M.H.
AU - Anderson, Michael
AU - Beresford, James
AU - Huang, Charles
AU - Naidoo, Robin
AU - Walpole, Matt
AU - Manica, Andrea
PY - 2015
Y1 - 2015
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84924082570&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1371/journal.pbio.1002074
DO - 10.1371/journal.pbio.1002074
M3 - Article
C2 - 25710450
AN - SCOPUS:84924082570
VL - 13
JO - PLoS Biol.
JF - PLoS Biol.
SN - 1544-9173
IS - 2
M1 - e1002074
ER -