Biodiversity and infrastructure interact to drive tourism to and within Costa Rica

Significance Tourism accounts for roughly 10% of global gross domestic product, with nature-based tourism its fastest-growing sector in the past 10 years. Nature-based tourism can theoretically contribute to local and sustainable development by creating attractive livelihoods that support biodiversity conservation, but whether tourists prefer to visit more biodiverse destinations is poorly understood. We examine this question in Costa Rica and find that more biodiverse places tend indeed to attract more tourists, especially where there is infrastructure that makes these places more accessible. Safeguarding terrestrial biodiversity is critical to preserving the substantial economic benefits that countries derive from tourism. Investments in both biodiversity conservation and infrastructure are needed to allow biodiverse countries to rely on tourism for their sustainable development.

• Publication year

  2022

• Venue

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

• Publication date

  2022-03-04

• Fields of study

  Geography, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1073/pnas.2107662119PMID 35245152PMCID 8931240
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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