A Global Assessment of Tourism and Recreation Conservation Threats to Prioritise Interventions

Abstract

Tourism has become a global economic driver, accounting for 11% of global GDP and 10% of total employment. Nature-based and wildlife tourism have particularly grown faster than the rest of the industry over the past 10 years. The sustainability of nature-based tourism, and recreation, is often assumed despite its contribution to global carbon emissions or extirpation of natural habitats. Indeed, the sector is advocated as key to sustainable development particularly for biodiversity and livelihoods gains. Nature tourism is also changing from specialised activities concentrated in protected areas (PA) to diversified activities and decline in PA visitation. This increases the difficulty to monitor and manage its potential impact on biodiversity and other sustainability targets. This growth is environmentally costly with now 5930 species for which tourism and recreation are conservation threats. For the first time we use global social media data to estimate where people go to experience nature and determine how this tourism and recreation pressure overlap with the distribution of threatened species. The more people seek interactions with nature in an area, the larger the number of species threatened by those interactions is. Clear crisis areas emerge where many species sensitive to tourism are exposed to high tourism pressure and those are mainly coastal marine regions. Our current tourism management approaches are not achieving biodiversity conservation. We must prioritise our efforts to diverge tourism away from areas where species are more susceptible to the habitat modification and disturbances caused by this industry.