This paper estimates the visitation demand function for Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park (KTP) in order to determine the conservation fee to charge South African residents to maximise park revenue.

In settings in which people rely directly on either forest or marine resources, protecting both the natural resources and livelihoods is challenging. Findings from Tanzania suggest that, where budgets are limited, key factors for a successful combination of livelihood and conservation policies include the strategic location of livelihood projects that target those most dependent on the protected resource rather than those most likely to cooperate with access restrictions.

The rapid disruption of tropical forests probably imperils global biodiversity more than any other contemporary phenomenon. With deforestation advancing quickly, protected areas are increasingly becoming final refuges for threatened species and natural ecosystem processes.

However, many protected areas in the tropics are themselves vulnerable to human encroachment and other environmental stresses. As pressures mount, it is vital to know whether existing reserves can sustain their biodiversity.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether community-based wildlife conservation can potentially be added in rural farmers’ investment portfolio to diversify and consequently reduce agricultural risk.

Design/methodology/approach – The correlation coefficient is computed from national data on the rates of return on agricultural production and wildlife conservation, to find out whether wildlife conservation is a feasible hedge asset.

Resultados de estudio económico y línea base de las actividades de los funcionarios en el Parque Nacional Corcovado y Marino Ballena

Global efforts to reduce tropical deforestation rely heavily on the establishment of protected areas. Measuring the effectiveness of these areas is difficult because the amount of deforestation that would have occurred in the absence of legal protection cannot be directly observed. Conventional methods of evaluating the effectiveness of protected areas can be biased because protection is not randomly assigned and because protection can induce deforestation spillovers (displacement) to neighboring forests.

To support conservation planning, we ask whether a park's impact on deforestation rates varies with observable land characteristics that planners could use to prioritize sites. Using matching methods to address bias from non-random location, we find deforestation impacts vary greatly due to park lands' characteristics. Avoided deforestation is greater if parks are closer to the capital city, in sites closer to national roads, and on lower slopes.

Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park is located in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa and neighbouring Botswana. The local communities on the South African side, the Khomani San (Bushmen) and Mier living adjacent to the park have land rights inside and outside the park.

This paper uses a bioeconomic modelling approach to show that for some optimal allocation of the mopane forest stock, the restrictive harvest period policy advocated by community leaders may not lead to sustainable harvesting of the worm.

National parks attract tourists to developing countries. However, there are only rare cases where the full economic rent from tourism in protected areas has been captured by these countries. This severely limits the capacity of developing countries to sustain these protected areas. The present study investigates the efficiency of the current pricing policies of Kakum National Park in Ghana.