LegiStorm

Summary:

Congress plays an overarching role in shaping outdoor recreation throughout the nation through legislation and oversight. As Congress continues to debate outdoor recreation issues—including provision of federal resources, planning efforts, and funding—data on the size, distribution, and relative importance of the outdoor recreation economy may inform these debates. Both historical and recent legislative and executive efforts centered on outdoor recreation have identified the economic importance of outdoor recreation. In 2016, Congress passed the Outdoor Recreation Jobs and Economic Impact Act (P.L. 114-249), which directed the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) in the Department of Commerce to create an account that would measure the outdoor recreation economy. BEA released the first official Outdoor Recreation Satellite Account (ORSA) statistics in September 2018 and updated them in September 2019. According to the ORSA statistics, in 2017, the current-dollar value added of the outdoor recreation economy was $427 billion, or 2.2% of gross domestic product (GDP). ORSA statistics show that supporting activities, such as construction and travel and tourism expenses, accounted for approximately half of value added. Conventional outdoor recreation activities, as defined by BEA, accounted for another 30.7% of real outdoor recreation gross output; other recreation accounted for 19.3%. The outdoor recreation economy grew by 3.9% in 2017, faster than the 2.4% growth for the overall U.S. economy, and has grown approximately 9.9% since 2012. Real gross output, real compensation, and real employment all grew faster in the outdoor recreation economy than in the overall economy in 2016. BEA reports that the "arts, entertainment, recreation, accommodation, and food services industry" was the largest contributor to the outdoor recreation economy in 2017, accounting for $112.9 billion of current-dollar outdoor recreation value added, followed by retail trade. These two sectors were also the largest industries included in the ORSA statistics for both compensation ($67.3 billion) and employment (2.1 million) in 2017. BEA released prototype statistics for states, which found that Hawaii, Montana, Maine, Vermont, and Wyoming had the five highest proportions of state GDP generated from outdoor recreation in 2017. In addition to the ORSA statistics, which are measured for the nation as a whole or for individual states, federal agencies sometimes measure the specific economic impact of federal lands. According to some studies, visitors to federal lands generated $55 billion in value added in FY2012 and $53.9 billion in value added in FY2016 (FY2017 dollars). Differences in methods, data, and assumptions mean any comparison between these figures and the ORSA statistics can be highly general at best. It is difficult to precisely measure the total amount of outdoor recreation that Americans engage in, due to differences in data collection, measurement, definitions, and other factors between sources. One source, the National Survey on Recreation and the Environment (NSRE), measures the number of people who engage in 17 different outdoor activities and how often they do so. According to the NSRE, over 194 million respondents (approximately 82% of respondents) engage in the most popular form of outdoor recreation (visiting developed sites) in a given year. Americans report engaging in the most popular surveyed activity, viewing nature, over 32.4 billion times in a given year, although this activity is a major outlier. Rates of participation in surveyed activities vary substantially and can depend on geographic location, proximity to recreation resources, demographic factors, and other influences. In FY2017, lands managed by the four federal land management agencies (the Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service, Forest Service, and National Park Service) had approximately 596 million visits. Lands managed by other federal agencies (the Bureau of Reclamation, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and United States Army Corps of Engineers) also had significant visitation. Visits to the lands of these other agencies sometimes exceeded visits to lands managed by the four federal land management agencies. Although publicly owned lands (including federal lands) generally have the greatest amount of recreation visits, private lands can dominate certain types of recreation, particularly in the eastern United States.