Nature-based tourism can help countries achieve their development goals while promoting biodiversity conservation. In destinations with rich natural assets but limited economic opportunities, nature-based tourism can create jobs and diversify rural economies. Money spent by tourists on activities, transportation, food, and accommodation ripple through local communities – generating jobs, income, and indirect impacts, benefiting poor and nonpoor households alike. By stimulating investment and economic activity in and around protected areas, tourism provides benefits to local communities and strengthens incentives to support and engage in conservation, which may otherwise create opportunity costs for them.
Nature-based tourism can also generate financing for biodiversity conservation. In many countries, visitor entrance fees, tourism concessions and leasing fees, and other financial mechanisms account for a substantial proportion of the budgets of protected and conserved areas. As a result, more and more countries are prioritizing nature-based tourism to fuel economic development and conservation.
The World Bank is investing in projects that help countries protect their natural assets, grow and diversify nature-based tourism businesses, and share the benefits from tourism with local communities. The World Bank also invests in new tools and knowledge to measure the local economic impacts of nature-based tourism, to help inform policies for sustainable development and conservation of protected areas.
Estimating the economic impact of tourism in protected areas on local economies
There is a significant lack of data and methodologies that measure the impacts of tourism at the local level. Furthermore, most cost-benefit studies of tourism projects focus only on activities that are directly affected by tourism, like hotels and lodges, restaurants, tour operators, and souvenir shops. Economic spillovers, or indirect impacts, are an important part of how tourism affects local economies and create income multipliers. Yet they are rarely considered in policy design or cost-benefit analysis for new tourism operations.
Local economy-wide impact evaluation (LEWIE) models can be used to quantify both the direct and indirect impacts of tourist spending on economies around protected areas. These approaches measure visitor numbers and tourist spending in protected areas and gather data from surveys of local households and businesses. The resulting data can make the case for greater investments in natural areas and tourism and inform policies that improve tourism and refine business models. Assessments can also help identify those protected areas that are generating high returns from government investments.
In Banking on Protected Areas, the World Bank published a LEWIE approach for protected area tourism, presenting data from assessments in Brazil, Fiji, Nepal, and Zambia (see country tabs below). The results documented how protected area tourism can be an engine for development, providing economic benefits to communities living around these areas.
The report showed that tourism generated jobs for:
- 30 percent of the working age population around Zambia’s South Luangwa National Park
- 14 percent around Zambia’s Lower Zambezi National Park
- 13 percent in Nadroga-Navosa and the Mamanuca Islands in Fiji
- 12 percent around Brazil’s Whale Coast, home to Abrolhos Marine National Park
- 3 percent around Nepal’s Chitwan National Park