Future tourism trends: Utilizing non-fungible tokens to aid wildlife conservation.

Abstract

The era of transformation powered by digitization, improvements in information and communication technology, machine learning, robotics and artificial intelligence is upon us. Today, we are able to solve complex problems with the aid of technology. That notwithstanding, animal populations globally are under threat, with the extinction of species taking place at a far accelerated pace than can be reversed, thus making wildlife conservation a critical issue of our time. Along with wildlife extinction currently underway, there remains a chronic financial shortage for wildlife conservation and the funding shortfall is expanding annually. This research contends that blockchain, the technology underpinning cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin can be utilized as a catalyst by the development of cryptowildlife nonfungible tokens (NFTs), which are provably scarce, unique and programmable digital wildlife collectible assets. These could be used to finance wildlife conservation as a supplementary source of revenue.