The Long-Run Impacts of Protected Areas on Income, Birds, and Tourism in South Africa

Protected areas cover 17% of the world’s land surface, yet credible evidence on their long-run economic and ecological impacts remains scarce. This paper estimates the effects of South Africa’s protected areas on household income, bird biodiversity, and tourism consumer surplus. For the income and biodiversity analyses, it develops a machine-learning counterfactual approach that recovers the present-day impacts of protected areas created up to 100 years ago. Short-run impacts of newer protected areas are small and statistically insignificant, while older protected areas generate large gains. Prior research may have severely underestimated the benefits of protected areas by only estimating the short-run effects of newly established protected areas. In aggregate, this paper estimates that protected areas increase annual household income by approximately R300 billion (roughly 10% of 2011 GDP). This yields approximately 7.6 million job-equivalents attributable to South Africa’s protected areas. Different types of protected areas play complementary roles in conserving different categories of threatened birds, demonstrating the value of South Africa’s entire protected area network. A structural travel cost model estimates that South Africa’s national parks generate R7.7 billion per year (2023 rand) in recreational value for domestic and international tourists. These results suggest that in South Africa there is little tradeoff between wildlife conservation and economic development. Realizing the economic and ecological benefits of protected areas, however, requires patience: returns to conservation accumulate over decades, not years.