A global assessment of tourism and recreation conservation threats to prioritise interventions

TL;DR

This study uses global social media data to map tourism pressures on threatened species, revealing critical areas where conservation efforts should be prioritized to mitigate biodiversity loss caused by increasing nature-based tourism.

Contribution

First global assessment linking social media-derived tourism data with threatened species distribution to identify conservation priority areas.

Findings

High tourism pressure overlaps with many threatened species, especially in coastal marine regions.

Current tourism management strategies are ineffective in conserving biodiversity.

Urgent need for global coordinated efforts to divert tourism from high-risk areas.

Abstract

We are increasingly using nature for tourism and recreation, an economic sector now generating more than 10% of the global GDP and 10% of global total employment. This growth though has come at a cost and we now have 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 pressures and those are mainly coastal marine regions. Our current tourism management approaches are not achieving biodiversity conservation. The global increase in nature tourism and recreation is set to continue and we need a global consistent response to mitigate its biodiversity impact. Like with other extractive industries, we must prioritise our efforts to diverge tourism away from crisis areas.