The scale of revenue derived from recreational scuba diving has been quantified for the first time in an international study – and the top-end figure of more than US $20 billion (around £15 billion) is said by the authors to provide a telling economic incentive for marine conservation.
The study has also revealed how much scuba diving now takes place within Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) – and how many diving professionals are natives of the countries in which they work.
Scuba diving contributes between $8.5 and $20.4 billion to the global economy each year, says marine biologist Octavio Aburto-Oropeza from the University of California San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who co-authored the study. The pursuit is reckoned to support up to 124,000 jobs across 170 countries.
Said to provide the first comprehensive estimate of the diving industry’s worldwide economic impact, the new study is part of Atlas Aquatica, a UN Ocean Decade project led by Aburto-Oropeza. The findings will, he hopes, help to organise the sector to give it a greater political voice for conservation.
While ocean-based tourism is already recognised as an economic force, the specific contribution of scuba diving had not previously been explored on a global scale, say the authors. This omission made it challenging for ocean-conservation advocates to cite scuba’s economic benefits.
“You can sail or surf above a dead ocean, but scuba divers notice if there are no fish – it’s really an activity that is dependent on the health of the system,” points out study co-author Fabio Favoretto, an Atlas Aquatica co-ordinator and post-doctoral researcher at Scripps. “That’s a positive for conservation, because it makes divers allies.”
Diving in MPAs
Increased ocean conservation can boost diving revenue by attracting more divers willing to pay higher prices to encounter the more diverse and numerous sea life afforded by conservation measures, as previous research has demonstrated. Scuba divers’ preference for MPAs is also supported by data showing that some 70% of all sea dives occur within these areas.
In 2021 Aburto-Oropeza and colleagues published a study that found that dive tourism in Mexico generated $725 million annually – almost as much as the nation’s entire fishing industry.
Extending the idea to explore revenue at the global level, for the new study the researchers compiled a list of more than 11,500 dive operators across the 170 countries, using data from Google Maps and diver training agency PADI and validating the database with local experts. An online survey then netted responses from 425 businesses across 81 countries.
Andrés Cisneros-Montemayor of Simon Fraser University in Canada led the economic analysis, using these responses to calculate the money spent directly on diving activities as well as indirect spending such as hotels, food and transport by 9-14 million annual recreational divers worldwide.
Statistical modelling was used to extrapolate the global economic impact. This revealed that direct spending on diving activities generates between $900 million and $3.2 billion annually, with the $20.4 billion figure including indirect spending.
The study also revealed that 80% of scuba-industry employees are local or national residents, and that dive operators have deep concerns about environmental degradation. Most of them reported negative changes at the dive-sites they visited over the past decade.
Natural allies
“Unlike mass-tourism operations that can harm local communities and marine environments, dive tourism, when managed well, can be economically viable, socially equitable and environmentally sustainable,” says Anna Schuhbauer, lead study author and fisheries scientist at the University of British Columbia.
“With a vested interest in healthy ecosystems and abundant marine life, dive-operators are natural allies in conservation efforts.”
The researchers are now recommending the standardisation of monitoring systems across the industry, formal inclusion of dive-operators in marine-management decisions, and recognition of ecotourism as a central component of sustainable ocean-based or ‘blue’ economies.
They also support dive-operators’ efforts to organise into co-operatives with a unified political voice through the Atlas Aquatica initiative, which already supports pilot schemes in Mexico and Italy.
Researchers from James Cook University (Australia), Marisol Plascencia de La Cruz of Centro (Mexico), National Geographic Society, North-West University (South Africa), Ørsted (Denmark), UC Santa Barbara, University of Pretoria (South Africa) and the University of Washington also took part in the study, which has just been published in the journal Cell Reports Sustainability.
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