Abstract
Annual revenue flow to developing countries for ecotourism (or nature-based tourism) could be as large as US$ 210×1012, providing an enormous financial incentive against habitat loss and exploitation. However, is ecotourism the most privately and/or socially valuable use of rainforest land? The question is rarely answered because the relevant data, estimates of profits and fixed costs, are rarely available. We present a social cost-benefit analysis of land use in an ecotourism cluster in the Tambopata region of Amazonian Peru. The net present value of ecotourism-controlled land is given by the producer surplus (profits plus fixed costs of ecotourism lodges): US$ 1,158 ha−1, which is higher than all currently practiced alternatives, including unsustainable logging, ranching, and agriculture. To our knowledge, this is the first sector-wide study of profitability and producer surplus in a developing-country ecotourism sector and the first to compare against equivalent measures for a spectrum of alternative uses. We also find that ecotourism-controlled land sequesters between 5.3 to 8.7 million tons of above-ground carbon, which is equivalent to between 3000–5000 years of carbon emissions from the domestic component of air and surface travel between the gateway city of Cusco and the lodges, at 2005 emission rates. Ecotourism in Tambopata has successfully monetized the hedonic value of wild nature in Amazonian Peru, and justifies the maintenance of intact rainforest over all alternative uses on narrow economic grounds alone.
Highlights
Many developing countries still have significant areas of wild nature to showcase for the pleasure of tourists and to attract investment in tourism
Sampled households controlled land parcels with a mean area of 51.364.2 ha (Supporting Information Table S1), of which on average 52.8% was standing forest, 7.8% was cleared for agriculture, 19.9% was cleared for cattle pasture, and the remaining 19.5% was in fallow
We find that ecotourism in Tambopata is, at the least, carbon neutral
Summary
Many developing countries still have significant areas of wild nature to showcase for the pleasure of tourists and to attract investment in tourism. Ecotourism is expected to bring about (i) economic and job-creation benefits, such as the building, maintenance and operation of hotels, the supply of goods and services to these, and the generation of government tax revenues [6,7,8,9]; (ii) new educational and training opportunities for management and labor, including interaction with foreigners and others from outside immediate social groups [6,8,10]; and (iii) incentives for the conservation of wild nature via the collection of user fees to finance PA management [9,11,12,13], via economic substitutes for exploitation of natural products, such as hunting [14,15], and via the establishment of privately-managed reserves on the periphery of PAs [1,16,17]. These benefits have led to the funding of innumerable projects and incentive schemes financed by governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the international community [18,19,20]
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