Socio-economic Information

Social and economic profiles of activities in the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage are relatively sparse, compared with biophysical information.

The largest commercial activity in the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area is tourism.

More information about GBR tourism:

• CRC brochure Marine Tourism on the Great Barrier Reef
• CRC Reef Sustainable tourism pages
• Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority’s State of the Reef Report (Management status: tourism & recreation)

Information about the numbers of visitors to the Reef with commercial marine tourism operators , for example, is collated in the Environmental Management Charge (EMC) database of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority . The EMC is a daily fee charged to every visitor on the GBR.

Three research projects monitor tourist and community perceptions and representation in the media (newspapers, television) of the GBR , , . Another project is conducting a social assessment of commercial fishers . Information on the registration of recreational vessels collected by the Queensland Department of Transport provides a surrogate for recreational fishing activity .

There are other important socio-economic data held with the Australian Bureau of Statistics that are not captured in this database (e.g. population, employment statistics, etc) link to ABS?.