Sustainable development of protected areas in Germany: claim and reality using the example of tourism of the German Wadden Sea region
Abstract
The Wadden Sea, located along the North Sea coast, is a valuable landscape for nature conservation and biodiversity. The integrity of the area is vital to support the global East Atlantic bird migration, which is a unique function of this area. Equally important, the region is a popular tourist destination and receives millions of visitors annually. The german Wadden Sea National Park was established in the 1980s to protect the landscape from increased resource-use pressure on the coast, islands, and in water. Some of the most prominent issues were decreases in animal populations and increases in water pollution. The German section is protected by three National Parks as well as three UNESCO biosphere reserves and is also a declared trilateral UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Regional economic development is supported and enhanced by the protected areas through, for example, nature tourism. Its protection status preserves the originality and beauty of the landscape and is what attracts visitors. Their spendings support tourism and generate further income for the region. This added value is measurable through regional economic effects. The extent to which the region’s tourism development incorporates sustainable development is indicated in the protected area’s legislation. But what claim of sustainable development is the German Wadden Sea region following and what is the reality of realizing the goals in the context of nature tourism?
For an empirical understanding, extensive demand-side studies of national park tourism in the German Wadden Sea were carried out between 2019 and 2022. This study aimed to present visitors’ perception and appreciation of the national parks on the Wadden Sea. The study’s objectives included questions relating to visitors’ travel decisions, expenditures, and the calculation of economic effects in the national park region. This estimation is based on the number of visitor days, the average daily expenditure of guests, and the respective tourism value-added quotas. To collect this data, empirical surveys were conducted at 30 different locations on the North and East Frisian islands, Halligen, and along the mainland coast of Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein. Over four years, 35,000 tourists were surveyed.
It is especially important in national parks, which are major tourism attractions, to find out how visitors’ perceptions and appreciation of national parks change, in addition to their regional economic contributions. The complexity of the different protected area labels in the study region raises questions regarding adequate research recognition and subsequent analysis methods of each protection layer. The link between claim and reality of sustainable tourism development in the German Wadden Sea will therefore be presented, facing formulated targets and empirical results.