Diving user fees and the financial sustainability of marine protected areas: Opportunities and impediments

Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) worldwide are reported as failing to achieve their conservation objectives due to insufficient funds, resulting in management shortfalls such as inadequate law enforcement and poor visitor management. The implementation of user fee systems has been suggested as a solution to the financial unsustainability of MPAs, with divers commonly willing to pay large sums of money to help protect the parks they visit. Studies assessing the potential and success of tourism user fees in the form of diving user fees have solely concentrated on the Caribbean Region and consequently a comprehensive understanding of the opportunities for revenue generation is not possible. This study investigated existing user fees in two important diving regions of the world, South-East Asia and the Francophone countries of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and the potential for the introduction of new fee systems there. Whilst the majority of MPAs in the Francophone countries of the Indian and Pacific Oceans are rarely visited by divers, MPAs in South-East Asia, like the Wider Caribbean, present a high potential to raise revenue for conservation via the implementation of diving user fees, although this potential is largely unexploited. This potential will be only realised when complex problems linked to governance and revenue collection are resolved.