  We are increasingly using nature for tourism and recreation, an economic
sector now generating more than 10% of the global GDP and 10% of global total
employment. This growth though has come at a cost and we now have 5930 species
for which tourism and recreation are conservation threats. For the first time
we use global social media data to estimate where people go to experience
nature and determine how this tourism and recreation pressure overlap with the
distribution of threatened species. The more people seek interactions with
nature in an area, the larger the number of species threatened by those
interactions is. Clear crisis areas emerge where many species sensitive to
tourism are exposed to high tourism pressures and those are mainly coastal
marine regions. Our current tourism management approaches are not achieving
biodiversity conservation. The global increase in nature tourism and recreation
is set to continue and we need a global consistent response to mitigate its
biodiversity impact. Like with other extractive industries, we must prioritise
our efforts to diverge tourism away from crisis areas.
