In this project Andrea Szabo and Gergely Ujhelyi measure the potential negative effects of National Parks on industries such as mining and logging, as well as on increased vehicle traffic and air pollution.

Background

What are the economic costs of environmental conservation? Concerns about such costs have traditionally stood in the way of expanding protected areas. In some cases, a belief that these costs are prohibitively large lead to the removal of lands from protected status (as in the case of Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears National Monuments in 2017, and Alaska’s Tongass National Forest in 2020).

We investigate the potential costs of conservation in the context of the US National Park System (NPS). Since the opening of the first national parks 150 years ago, observers have voiced concerns about parks hurting industries such as mining, logging, and grazing. Because part of the NPS’s mandate is to improve visitor access to conserved areas, there are also frequent concerns regarding increased vehicle traffic and air pollution. Our study attempts to quantify some of these negative effects.

Study design

We rely on the new dataset on NPS units introduced in Szabo and Ujhelyi (2024). Using a similar methodology, we investigate the impact of National Parks and other units in the system on employment and income in various industries in the counties surrounding the parks. We also include data on air pollution and traffic accidents to study potential negative externalities related to increased tourism.

Findings

Our preliminary results show that opening new parks leads to mine closures. At the same time, there is little evidence that this reduced total mining employment – perhaps because the remaining mines were able to soak up most of the workers displaced from the mines that shut down. As expected, changing an existing park’s designation to National Park has no additional negative impact on the mining sector.

We do not find negative effects on either farming or logging / forestry from either National Park designation or the opening of new parks. The evidence shows that this could be due in part to adaptation by affected firms. For example, we find that the opening of a new park leads to an increase in the volume of timber extracted in nearby areas, indicating that loggers are able to substitute towards new sources of timber when an area becomes protected.

We do not find evidence that parks increase pollution, but there is evidence of an increase in traffic fatalities following the opening of a park, which is in line with the increase in tourism documented in Szabo and Ujhelyi (2024).

Read the full study