MAPPING THE GLOBAL DISTRIBUTION AND VALUE OF MANGROVE TOURISM

Abstract

Nature-based tourism has been proliferating globally as there is a growing awareness about the environment and being environmentally-friendly around the globe. An example of this can be found in mangrove-related tourism, where there are more tourists visiting mangrove forests, albeit at a slow pace. Tourism falls under the cultural ecosystem services category out of the four types of ecosystem services as defined by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Most of the past efforts on quantifying the worth of mangrove forests had been done via the ecological and economical valuation of the services being provided. However, due to the intangible nature of cultural ecosystem services, current efforts to value mangroves solely on their social aspect, i.e. tourism, is still currently. Understanding the economic value tourism in mangrove can provide will highlight the value of protecting and conserving the mangrove forests in a world where a large extent of mangrove forests has already been lost. This thesis hence aims to determine the value of mangrove forests at the global scale using multiple sources, including national-level expenditure statistics as well as photographs sampled from various social media platforms, in order to obtain two distinct components of mangrove value. The first consists of “mangrove-adjacent” value, which covers the tourism benefits derived in the vicinity of the mangroves, while the second component is “in-situ” mangrove value, associated with activities that are directly conducted in the mangrove forests. Tourism values were estimated as a proportion of the total spending by coastal tourists within a 10 km distance from the mangroves. From this expenditure, mangrove-adjacent values were taken as a fixed proportion of 10% while in-situ values were determined via the relative abundance of photographs that were geotagged within the locations of the mangrove forests. The worth of tourism in the world’s mangroves were estimated at approximately US$16.8 billion, or a very small percentage of 0.7% of all coastal tourism value in the world’s countries with mangrove forests.