Original Source

Investigating Acceptance of Marine Tourism Levies, to Cover the Opportunity Costs of Conservation for Coastal Communities

Ecological Economics

Volume: 201: 107578

8/6/2022

Booth, H., Mourato, S. & Milner-Gulland, E. J.

3

Yes

From the source: "HB acknowledges the OxfordNaturalMotion Graduate Scholarship from the University of Oxford for funding her DPhil studies, as well as Save Our Seas Foundation and a Society for Conservation Biology Graduate Student Research Fellowship for funding field work. EJMG acknowledges the Pew Charitable Trusts for funding her Pew Marine Fellowship."

From the source: "The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper."
Posted on

Summary

This study conducted an online survey in Indonesia that targeted people with a general interest in travel, assessing their willingness to pay (WTP) for a marine conservation fee (in addition to the price of tourism activities) that would directly compensate tropical fishers for reducing their catches of endangered shark species. The study found that WTP correlated with income, holiday budget, and pro-environmental behavior and attitude. $10 – $14.99 USD was the amount that fell in the middle of all the conservation fees offered to and selected by participants. Additionally, the study estimated that even relatively modest tourism levies could generate significant funding sources for community-based payment for ecosystem services schemes, which could have meaningful conservation benefits for Critically Endangered sharks, skates, and rays. A strength of the study was that the survey was not described to participants as environmental or conservation research,which reduced the likelihood that only people with environmental concerns would participate in the study (who do not reflect all tourists). A limitation of the study’s survey is the over-representation of wealthier Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) segments of the international marine tourism market due to distribution limitations such as English-only availability and the use of Prolific which is restricted to OECD countries and South Africa.

Marine tourism is promoted as a substitute economic activity to unsustainable fishing, which is compatible with conservation. However, benefits of marine tourism do not typically accrue in small-scale fisheries (SSFs), which often bear the costs of conservation; they accrue to tourists and tourist-focussed businesses. We explored how marine tourism levies could operationalise the beneficiary-pays principle and address these cost-benefit inequities using an online contingent valuation (CV) survey to measure international tourists' willingness-to-pay (WTP) towards community-based shark conservation (N = 1033). Levies were widely supported (96%), with median and Turnbull mean WTP of US$ 10–14.99 and $22.02 per person per day, respectively. We combined these results with data from two marine tourism hotspots in Indonesia – Lombok and Pulau Weh – to explore the feasibility of implementing tourism levies to incentivize pro-conservation behaviour in local SSFs. Our conservative estimates indicate that marine tourism levies in Lombok and Pulau Weh could respectively generate US$ 2.3–10 million and US$ 300,000–1.3 million annually – several times greater than the estimated costs of conservation incentives in local SSFs. The marine tourism industry offers an under-utilised revenue stream for marine conservation, which could support policy aspirations such as ‘a sustainable and equitable blue economy’.