Tourism and Biodiversity: A natural partnership

Abstract

As the world's population continues to grow, the natural world inevitably is shrinking. But as nature becomes a rarer commodity, it also becomes more valuable. Nature's contributions to human welfare include the classic arguments for conservation: protecting watersheds and soils, conserving biological diversity, and providing sites for scientific research and education. But these values do not often show up in the nation's economic report card because they are not part of the cash economy.