Nature-based tourism in a changing climate: costs and benefits for endangered species

Climate change represents one of the greatest challenges facing humanity, with multiple, interacting impacts on the natural world and on human well-being. Tourism has been estimated to account for 8% of global carbon emissions, with tourism volumes continuing to grow rapidly. Nevertheless, tourism is an economic mainstay for some countries with high biodiversity but low wealth, and nature-based tourism can provide important incentives to conserve individual species, landscapes, and seascapes. This inevitably sets up tensions between the positive and negative impacts of nature-based tourism on both biodiversity and human well-being. Such tensions are difficult to resolve and have, to-date, received little attention.

This PhD project will quantify the positive and negative climate-related socioecological impacts of nature-based tourism, using as a model system a specific endangered species, the African wild dog. Recent research has suggested major impacts of climate change on wild dog populations, apparently because high ambient temperatures constrain wild dog hunting behaviour, leading to low food intake and hence high mortality. This relatively simple mechanism allows direct links to be drawn between carbon emissions and wild dog extinction risk.

At the same time, wild dog populations rely on wildlife-friendly habitat for their persistence, and much of this habitat is conserved to support nature-based tourism. In turn, nature-based tourism supports local economies and socio-cultural systems, which are therefore also at risk from climate change impacts, in terms of loss of wild dogs and wildlife-friendly habitat. Ironically, these socio-cultural systems rely heavily on continued tourism and thus, continued and potentially increasing carbon emissions from tourists travelling to and visiting the region. This project seeks to explore these two apparently, irreconcilable trade-offs.

The project's specific aims are:
(1)Combining available data on the carbon footprint of international tourism (especially aviation) with an existing model linking carbon emissions to African wild dog population dynamics(3), quantify the contribution of tourism to wild dog extinction risk at specific sites throughout Africa.
(2) Through semi-structured interviews and focus groups with local communities at established field sites in Kenya and South Africa, investigate and evaluate the contribution of nature-based tourism to local people's tolerance for coexisting with wild dogs.
(3) Through key informant interviews with African policymakers and conservation professionals, explore the role that nature-based tourism plays in conserving landscapes which support wild dog populations.
(4) Combine evidence on the costs (in terms of carbon emissions) and benefits (in terms of habitat conservation, local tolerance and contributions to human wellbeing) of nature-based tourism for wild dog populations, to inform policy debates around the promotion of tourism within shrinking carbon budgets.