Estimating the Economic, Social and Environmental Value of Tourism to Protected Areas

Abstract

This project provides series of detailed assessments of tourism values and costs in localities adjacent to protected areas in Tasmania, Victoria and Western Australia. The project demonstrates a range of techniques for respectively measuring social, environmental and economic impacts of tourism activity. It involved tourists, townspeople, natural area managers and government authorities. The project draws together recent work on economic valuation of protected area tourism by Carlsen and Wood (2004), social values of tourism by Fredline, Deery and Jago (2006) and environmental values of tourism based on work by Michael Lockwood at the University of Tasmania and David Wood in Western Australia.. As a final stage, the project identified the costs of tourism activity to a region based on a case study of Exmouth. The project aims to provide methods for identifying monetary and non-monetary values for tourism across a range of study areas using methods that may be replicated across regions. While not currently fully integrating social, economic and environmental measures, the methods will inform the development of toolkits for the assessment of these values of protected areas, which will be made widely available for use. The process of creating toolkits has begun with the existing Valuing Places Toolkit, which is based on the economic valuation methods detailed in this report