Tourist visits to Madagascar's protected areas linked to deforestation decreases within but increases outside protected area boundaries

Abstract Tourist visits to protected areas (PAs) are a widely promoted, yet largely untested, approach to achieve forest conservation and socioeconomic development. We assessed the impacts of annual tourist visits to 40 Madagascar PAs over 20 years on local deforestation in and around PA boundaries, using a two‐way fixed effects approach to control for confounding variables. We did not detect a tourism‐associated change in total deforestation (inside and 3 km outside PAs combined). Inside PAs, however, we estimated that every 1000 tourist visits to a given PA decreased deforestation within that PA by 3.2% of the mean annual rate and increased the rate by 2.5% in the area immediately (≤3 km) outside PA boundaries. Deforestation associated with tourism outside PA boundaries was concentrated near PA entrances and decreased farther from PA boundaries. Tourist visits were consistently associated with decreased deforestation within PAs and increased deforestation outside PA boundaries across tests with different temporal and spatial scales, model assumptions, and potential sources of bias. Our results suggest that tourism in PAs may have different impacts on protected and surrounding unprotected forest cover, which should be considered in conservation planning alongside tourism's socioeconomic and potential nonlocal impacts.