My local patch of Stanwick Lakes is actually a small part of an EU SPA – a Special Protection Area for Birds, notified under the EU Birds Directive. But to me, it’s simply my local patch where I go for a walk to see birds, ignore plants, and to think about the world. It is very important to me. Really! Very important.
A scientific paper published yesterday in the open access journal PLOS Biology looks at the tourism value of protected areas.
Apparently my 50+ visits to Stanwick Lakes each year are 50 of 8 billion visits to the world’s protected areas each year. I’m certainly getting more than my fair share because Stanwick Lakes is not the only SSSI, SPA, SAC or National Park I visit in the year. I suspect I visited about 10 last weekend! This study suggests that about 80% of these visits are in Europe.
The authors of the study say that this number of visits could generate as much as US$600 billion of tourism expenditure annually – a huge economic benefit which vastly exceeds the less than US$10 billion spent safeguarding these sites each year.
Scientists and conservation experts describe current global expenditure on protected areas as “grossly insufficient”, and have called for greatly increased investment in the maintenance and expansion of protected areas – a move which this study shows would yield substantial economic return – as well as saving incalculably precious natural landscapes and species from destruction.
“It’s fantastic that people visit protected areas so often, and are getting so much from experiencing wild nature – it’s clearly important to people and we should celebrate that,” says lead author Professor Andrew Balmford, from Cambridge University’s Department of Zoology.
“These pieces of the world provide us with untold benefits: from stabilising the global climate and regulating water flows to protecting untold numbers of species. Now we’ve shown that through tourism nature reserves contribute in a big way to the global economy– yet many are being degraded through encroachment and illegal harvesting, and some are being lost altogether. It’s time that governments invested properly in protected areas.”
On the BBC 6o clock news tonight.