Bernabas Wolde

Financing the sustainable management of Rwanda's protected areas

ABSTRACT Rwandas Nyungwe National Park is a biodiversity hotspot with the most endemic species in the ecoregion and the highest number of threatened species internationally. Nyungwe supplies critical ecosystem services to the Rwandan population including water provisioning and tourism services. Tourism in the Park has strong potential for financing enhanced visitor experiences and the sustainable management of the Park. This paper explores quantitatively the economic impacts of adjustment in Park visitation fees and tourism demand as a source of revenues to improve Park tourism opportunities and ongoing operations and maintenance. The methods developed in this paper are novel in integrating the results of stated preference techniques with a regional computable general equilibrium modelling approach to capture multisectoral, direct, indirect and induced impacts. Such methods have strong potential for assessing revenue generation alternatives in other contexts where park managers are faced with the need to generate additional revenue for sustainable park management while facing diminishing budget allocations. Results of this analysis demonstrate that adjustment of Park fees has a relatively small impact on the regional economy and well-being when compared with a strategy aimed at generating increased tourism demand through investment in improving the visitor experience at Nyungwe National Park.

Valuing visitor access to forested areas and exploring willingness to pay for forest conservation and restoration finance: The case of small island developing state of Mauritius

Small island developing states share as common constraints their small size, geographical dispersion, greater vulnerability to rapid and drastic environmental change, and limited administrative and technical resources. Within these, they have to cater for urban and agricultural areas, as well as enough natural landscape for ecosystem services. Funding for conservation of forest ecosystems on these islands has received relatively less attention and national park systems are chronically underfunded. We used Mauritius as a case study to investigate the willingness to pay for conservation of state and privately owned forests. It is part of a biodiversity hotspot with highly threatened forest ecosystems, but has known some conservation successes. We designed and administered survey based contingent valuation approach to estimate the willingness to pay entry fees to visit forest areas across the island. Study results suggest international and domestic tourists have a mean willingness to pay of USD 7.73 and USD 3.74 respectively, for conservation. These values represent amounts visitors are willing to pay every time they visit a public or private forested site. Results show that mid-level supervisory roles positively influence willingness to pay values. Results also show that people aged 50 and above, not having any supervisory role, married with one child or less, tend to have lower willingness to pay for conservation.