Tourism has a critical role in the portfolio of economic and political measures required to approach the Aichi Targets for the expansion of protected areas. Tourism receives remarkably little attention in highlevel conservation debates, but in fact it already funds >50 per cent of some national parks agency budgets and contributes >50 per cent of conservation funding for some IUCN-red listed species. In addition, managing both revenue and threats from tourism is one of the major practical preoccupations of protected area managers on the ground. The ways in which tourism can support or threaten conservation depend strongly on local social, political and legal frameworks and hence differ markedly between countries, and between different land tenures within countries. In addition, the ways in which tourism can be mobilized as a conservation tool, or avoided as a conservation threat, differ between political and socioeconomic groups within each country. This paper argues that for good or bad, tourism has become an unavoidable component of conservation efforts worldwide, and deserves far greater attention from the conservation community. public, communal and private land tenures. This is slow, incomplete and expensive, and may lead to further proliferation of paper parks. Funds are needed to buy out leases and other legal rights, compensate politically powerful corporations and regional electorates, persuade landowners to modify land-use, and cover costs of conservation management. Government budgets for parks agencies, however, are inadequate and falling, especially in biodiverse developing nations. Parks agencies are therefore forced to find new conservation finance to meet the Aichi Targets. Options differ between nations and places. Carbon offsets and international aid are large but unfocussed. Environmental stewardship schemes, where governments pay landowners for conservation practices, are more focussed but smaller and less widespread. Many options suffer from political and commercial manipulation, which render them ineffective for conservation. Different programmes operate at different levels of government, are available to different landowners, use different incentive systems, and provide different legal protection. Some use competitive