Trees, tourists and trade-offs

Tourists mostly come to Madagascar for one reason – its wildlife. A survey carried out in 2000 found that more than half of visitors came to the island for nature tourism (Christie and Crompton, 2003). Madagascar is one of the most biologically diverse places on Earth, with over 80 per cent of its species found nowhere else on the planet (Ganzhorn et al., 2001; Goodman and Benstead, 2005). The majority of the island’s endemic species live exclusively in forest or woodland (Dufils, 2003), which cover approximately 89,000 km² of the island and of which nearly half is rainforest (Harper et al., 2008; Figure 6.1).