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Tourism and visitor management in protected areas

All forms of tourism create environmental impacts, but these differ by orders of magnitude. At one end of the scale are minimal-impact wilderness travellers, either on foot or by water. These are permitted in many protected areas worldwide, and there is a well-tested suite of management and monitoring tools, summarised in this volume, to provide benefits to visitors without compromising primary conservation goals. At the other end of the scale are large-scale infrastructure, accommodation, and catering facilities, some of which can handle over a hundred thousand visitors a day.

A spatial overview of the global importance of Indigenous lands for conservation

Understanding the scale, location and nature conservation values of the lands over which Indigenous Peoples exercise traditional rights is central to implementation of several global conservation and climate agreements. However, spatial information on Indigenous lands has never been aggregated globally. Here, using publicly available geospatial resources, we show that Indigenous Peoples manage or have tenure rights over at least ~38 million km2 in 87 countries or politically distinct areas on all inhabited continents.