Schuhbauer, Anna, Favoretto, Fabio, Wang, Terrance, Aburto-Oropeza, Octavio, Sala, Enric, Millage, Katherine D., Cabral, Reniel B., Sumaila, U. Rashid, Hsu, Astrid, Lucrezi, Serena, Tighsazzadeh, Mohammad Nasir, Plascencia de La Cruz, Marisol, and Cisneros-Montemayor, Andrés M. (2025) Global economic impact of scuba dive tourism. Cell Reports Sustainability, 2 (7). 100435.

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Abstract

Marine ecotourism is increasingly popular and important for local economies, but its aggregated benefits to the global ocean economy are little known and often overlooked in policy discussions. Here, we present a first estimate of the global economic impact of scuba diving based on an online survey of scuba dive operators across the world. We estimate the global annual revenue of scuba diving (direct diving expenditure) at between 0.9 and 3.2 billion USD per year and a broader economic impact (direct and indirect expenditure) at between 8.5 and 20.4 billion USD per year. Marine ecotourism is one of the most promising ocean sectors that can incentivize local sustainable economies, and with 9–14 million marine diving tourists worldwide supporting up to 124,000 jobs, the scuba diving sector could be at the forefront of transformative change for local and global ocean sustainability.

Item ID:	86961
Item Type:	Article (Research - C1)
ISSN:	2949-7906
Copyright Information:	© 2025 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Date Deposited:	26 Aug 2025 01:45
FoR Codes:	38 ECONOMICS > 3801 Applied economics > 380116 Tourism economics @ 100%
SEO Codes:	15 ECONOMIC FRAMEWORK > 1599 Other economic framework > 159902 Ecological economics @ 100%
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