Understanding the role of tourism in protected areas
National parks sit at the intersection of conservation, recreation, and economic interest, and as visitation grows, so does the argument that tourism can help fund and protect these landscapes. I don’t think that argument is wrong exactly, but I don’t think it’s the whole story either. The real question isn’t whether tourism helps national parks. It’s whether it strengthens them over time, or slowly changes what they are.
Tourism is usually presented as a straightforward positive. It can support regional economies, create political incentives to protect land that might otherwise be sold off or logged, and encourage people to actually value nature they’d otherwise never see. At a small scale, I think those benefits are real. Local guiding services, basic accommodation outside park boundaries, and low-impact visitor experiences can genuinely coexist with conservation goals, and this is the version of tourism most people picture when they hear the word.
The problem is that this isn’t the only version of tourism that shows up in protected areas, and the conversation changes considerably once tourism shifts from small-scale access to large-scale commercial development.
Recent global research led by environmental scientist Ralf Buckley looked at this trend across protected areas worldwide, and the findings are worth taking seriously rather than dismissing as one researcher’s opinion. Buckley’s work found that large-scale tourism development in protected areas often creates long-term ecological impact, because infrastructure brings vegetation clearing, habitat disturbance, and ongoing servicing requirements that don’t go away once the ribbon-cutting is done. Once a development is established, it’s rarely removed. Even where individual projects look low impact on their own, the cumulative effect across a park, or across a park system, can be significant. That’s where the tension actually sits, not in any single lodge or boardwalk, but in what accumulates once the precedent is set.
One of the more subtle shifts here isn’t physical at all, it’s conceptual. Protected areas were created as places for conservation, with recreation treated as a secondary benefit. Increasingly, I think they’re being framed as tourism assets first, and that reframing changes how decisions get made. Instead of asking what a landscape needs, the question becomes what that landscape can support commercially. That’s not a small distinction. It changes which projects get approved, which get knocked back, and who ends up making that call.
A lot of this shift travels through language rather than through anything you can point to on a map. Terms like eco-tourism, nature positive, and sustainable development get attached to projects proposed inside protected areas, and some of those projects genuinely live up to the label. Others use the language while quietly introducing permanent infrastructure into sensitive environments. Telling the difference means looking past the label to the actual footprint, scale, and permanence of what’s being proposed, because the label itself tells you almost nothing.
So what actually supports conservation, based on what the evidence points to? A more grounded model, where infrastructure inside parks stays minimal and low impact, where visitor experiences are largely self-directed rather than packaged, where higher-impact tourism sits outside protected area boundaries rather than inside them, and where access stays broad rather than being rationed by price. That combination protects both ecological integrity and public access, and it’s also what keeps wild places feeling wild rather than managed.
For hikers and regular park users, none of this is abstract. As environments become more developed, solitude decreases, tracks become more engineered and less natural, and experiences shift from self-reliant to service-based. Some of that makes parks more accessible to people who wouldn’t otherwise get out there, and I don’t dismiss that. But it also erodes the qualities that made a lot of us go to these places in the first place. For plenty of hikers, that erosion is the whole cost.
None of this is an argument against tourism in national parks. It’s an argument for being clear-eyed about what kind of tourism we’re talking about. Tourism supports conservation when it’s appropriately located, low impact, and aligned with the actual purpose of protected areas. It becomes a problem when it introduces permanent infrastructure into sensitive landscapes, prioritises commercial return over conservation outcomes, or limits access through cost or exclusivity. That distinction is the one that matters, far more than whether a project can put “eco” in front of its name.
National parks aren’t empty spaces waiting to be developed. They’re protected for a reason, and the challenge was never really about whether people should get to experience them. It’s about how that experience is shaped, and what’s left behind once it’s been shaped that way, because a landscape reshaped for commercial use rarely goes back to what it was.
These issues are explored further in:
Position on Trail Access and Development →
