Pandemic Travel Restrictions Provide a Test of Net Ecological Effects of Ecotourism and New Research Opportunities

Net ecological impacts of ecotourism, and related nature and adventure tourism subsectors, may be either positive or negative (Buckley 2009). Travel restrictions due to the COVID19 coronavirus pandemic have provided a worldwide natural experiment. Historical parallels were much more limited. They include past global economic downturns, conflicts cutting off tourism to individual countries, and government shutdowns removing ranger protection from national parks (Buckley 2014, 2020). The 2020 pandemic imposed far more comprehensive changes than any of these, and hence provides a more powerful test. Consequences of the coronavirus for tourism, and vice versa, have already been examined extensively (Chinazzi et al. 2020; Gössling, Scott, and Hall 2020; Nguyen and Coca-Stefaniak 2020; Yang, Zhang, and Chen 2020). There have been recommendations for possible systemic changes in future, including social and environmental as well as economic aspects (Higgins-Desbiolles 2020; Nepal 2020). There is little evidence as to whether these may actually occur. Here, I consider a much more limited question, namely, what the actual events of early 2020 can reveal regarding the net ecological effects of ecotourism for parks and wildlife. Previously published evaluations of the ecological effects of tourism reductions during the coronavirus pandemic have been either broad but general, or detailed but localized (Buckley 2020; Newsome 2020; Pearson et al. 2020). The net effects of ecotourism on individual threatened species, however, differ greatly between species and circumstances (Buckley, Morrison, and Castley 2016; Naidoo et al. 2016). In consequence, localized results cannot be extrapolated reliably. Here, therefore, I aim to identify large-scale patterns, by assembling and comparing multiple case studies. In particular, I compare cases from wealthy developed nations with those from less wealthy developing and newly industrialized nations, NINs. In developed nations, public funding and protection of parks has continued, but visitor numbers and associated ecological impacts, especially on wildlife, have been greatly reduced (USNPS 2020). Most of these reductions are temporary. In a few cases, however, they have provided improved opportunities for successful reproduction of threatened species, with likely longer-term increases to populations (USNPS 2020). Some of these cases, for example, for endangered marine turtle species, occur in newly industrialized nations such as the BRICS countries of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (Newsome 2020; Phillips 2020; Reuters 2020). In many developing nations, conservation relies on a matrix of public, communal, and private reserves, funded jointly by taxpayers, tourism, NGOs, and donors. For these, the pandemic has exposed particular tourist impacts and differential reliance on tourism or donations. In Botswana, for example, >80% of conservation funding is from international tourism (Buckley et al. 2012). During early 2020, there have been large increases in poaching of threatened species such as black and white rhinoceros, necessitating emergency measures (Patta 2020; Maron 2020; Newsome 2020). There has also been increased poaching of African elephant, giraffe, gorilla, and many other species (Kuiper et al. 2020; Losh 2020). Similar concerns apply in other developing and newly industrialized countries. Private conservation measures are important, for example, for a number of threatened species in Latin America (Buckley and Cooper 2019). In India, threats to tiger have increased through collapse of livestock compensation schemes funded by tourism (Buckley and Pabla 2012) and poaching of prey species (Matthews 2020). Poaching has increased for jaguar and puma in Colombia (Beck 2020) and critically endangered ibis and stork species in Cambodia (Alberts 2020). Deforestation is accelerating, for example, in SE Asia and Brazil (Taylor 2020; Charner 947812 JTRXXX10.1177/0047287520947812Journal of Travel ResearchBuckley letter2020