Valuing Victoria's Parks
Victoria’s parks are highly valued by the community. They provide open space, stunning landscapes, habitats to protect flora and fauna and areas to conserve cultural heritage. While these values are undoubtedly important in their own right, our parks also play an often unrecognised role in providing benefits that flow beyond park boundaries to contribute to Victoria’s health, wellbeing, liveability and economy.
Valuing Victoria’s Parks Report provides world-leading information on the value of Victoria’s parks to our communities and the economy.
Valuing Victoria’s Parks is based on best practice environmental accounting that quantifies the benefits that parks and their ecosystems provide. The report shows tourists spend $1.4 billion per year in Victoria related to their visits to parks, adding 14,000 jobs to the State’s economy.
Additionally our parks contain over one million hectares of catchments which supply water used for drinking, food production and other industries. The value of water filtration services provided by parks is estimated at $83 million per year.
Valuing Victoria’s Parks also shows that they provide important amenity for Victorian residents, with some 12,000 residences adjoining parks in Melbourne and 85,000 residences adjoining parks beyond Greater Melbourne. The value of this amenity is estimated at between $21 million and $28 million.