Operationalising marine tourism levies to cover the opportunity costs of conservation for coastal communities

Hollie Booth, Susana Mourato and E.J. Milner-Gulland
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Hollie Booth: University of Oxford
Susana Mourato: London School of Economics and Political Science

No 9gzy3, OSF Preprints from Center for Open Science

Abstract: 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 to 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 = 1,033). Levies were widely supported (96%), with a median and Turnbull mean WTP of US$ 10-14.99 and $22.02 per person per day, respectively. We combined these results with field data from two marine tourism hotspots in Indonesia – Lombok and Pulau Weh - to explore the feasibility of implementing tourism levies to incentivise pro-conservation behaviour in local SSFs. Our conservative estimates indicate that conservation levies in Lombok and Pulau Weh could respectively generate US$ 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’.

Date: 2022-04-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-env, nep-sea and nep-tur
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:osfxxx:9gzy3

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/9gzy3

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