Human Use in World Heritage Natural Sites: A Global Inventory

As part of an on-going process of conducting global reviews of World Heritage (WH) natural sites and issues affecting them, IUCN conducted a study of human uses of all 129 natural and mixed natural sites on the WH List. In this overview, IUCN compiled the tourism data on each site to demonstrate just how substantial visitation numbers are and to detect variations between the different sites and continents. The global overview results are provided in this article, but some main conclusions on tourism are: Nearly 63 million people each year visit 118 World Heritage natural sites; 15 sites record over one million visitors/year with the Great Smoky Mts. Having the highest number (9,265,667); The 32 sites in USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand accommodate over 84% all the visitors; The average visitation for the 30 sites in Africa is 22,705/year compared to 2.6 million visitors/year average in the 16 sites in USA and Canada; Economic valuations are available for some sites with the highest impact recorded for Yosemite ($1.3 billion/year) and a trend in all sites towards an increase in levels of visitation.