Elephants are a big draw to parks across Africa, so as their numbers dwindle, so too do the numbers of tourists coming to see them. The first continent-wide assessment of poaching’s effects on tourism reveal that the annual killing of elephants results in a $25 million loss in tourism revenue across Africa. What’s more, this lost revenue is significantly higher than the cost of combating poaching, making it economically favorable to invest in the protection of elephants.
Every year some 20,000 to 30,000 elephants are slaughtered for their ivory tusks to feed a demand for Chinese and Southeast Asian markets, despite a commercial ban on the trade of ivory. Elephant populations across the continent have fallen up to 60 percent. [...]
Despite these national and international security concerns, funneling money into policing illegal wildlife trade is a hard sell when many of the countries where the killings occur have other serious humanitarian problems that need addressing like food security and access to clean drinking water, among others.
So researchers from World Wildlife Fund, Cambridge University, and the University of Vermont, conducted an economic analysis to try and find out just exactly what the economic benefit would have been if the 20,000 to 30,000 elephants killed each year were kept alive. [...]
The economic returns in the forested areas of Central Africa, however, were hugely negative. The parks there see much less tourist visitation, largely due to poor visibility of the dense jungle environments compared to the wide open savannah of East and Southern Africa. Security concerns outside of poaching might also play a part. The Eastern portion of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, has been in a near constant state of conflict for over a decade. Regardless, the forest elephant losses there have been catastrophic.
No comments:
Post a Comment