Banking on Protected Areas: Promoting Sustainable Protected Area Tourism to Benefit Local Communities

The conservation of biodiversity matters because of its intrinsic worth, and because ecosystem services, which depend upon biodiversity, underpin human wellbeing, and support economic activity in a range of sectors. Our survival is, finally, impossible without intact natural landscapes and seascapes. Land- and marine-based ecosystems provide food, oxygen, water, carbon sequestration, resilience in the face of climate change, and a buffer against pandemics. They also foster economic activities such as tourism, which attract eight billion visitors a year to protected areas. The need to protect these natural areas has never been greater. The newly launched Banking on Protected Areas: Promoting Sustainable Protected Area Tourism to Benefit Local Economies makes a call to promote sustainable tourism in protected areas to recover from the economic fallout of the pandemic, address longstanding development challenges, and conserve biodiversity.