Mount Kilimanjaro view from the southern slopes.
Photo credit: M. Eugenia Degano

By M. Eugenia Degano, Sophie Augustino Kwaslema, Katrin Böhning-Gaese, Andreas Hemp, Lisa Lehnen, Berta Martín-López, Jasmine Pearson, Thomas Mueller, and Ugo Arbieu.

Read the full paper here.

For many international tourists, conquering Mount Kilimanjaro’s highest peak, Uhuru Peak, is the ultimate challenge. As the world’s tallest free-standing mountain, Kilimanjaro attracts over 500,000 climbers every year. While reaching the summit is a mental and physical feat, the mountain offers far more than a mere climbing challenge. It spans diverse ecosystems including dry savannas, lush rainforests, and alpine heath, each home to unique species like the guereza monkey or the giant groundsel. Despite these rich ecosystems, our knowledge of the intangible benefits that tourists gain from Kilimanjaro (also called non-material nature’s contributions to people) and the elements of nature contributing to these experiences, remains limited.

To explore this, we examined tourists’ posts on Twitter (now X). This allowed us to identify 15 distinct non-material benefits reflecting their emotional interaction with Kilimanjaro’s nature. One notable example was “Sense of Achievement,” with climbers expressing their success through phrases like “made it” and “sense of invincibility” once at the top of the mountain. Another significant benefit was “Life-changing Perspectives”, where tourists reflected on deep personal changes that nature inspired. For instance, one tourist shared how their Kilimanjaro trek led them to move from a city to a mountainous area.

People tied these benefits to encounters with both living and non-living elements, such as birds, mammals, geological and water features. Surprisingly, areas with the richest biodiversity at mid-elevation were associated with fewer perceived benefits and fewer posts about biotic elements. We suspect that tourists’ focus on summit climbing overshadow their engagement with the surrounding biodiversity. Thus, tourists most frequently highlighted benefits and abiotic features like glaciers or sunrises associated with the summit area. However, tourists did mention biotic elements to some extent, especially outside the borders of the national park, reflecting their involvement in other nature-based activities like day hikes to Materuni waterfall, Lake Chala or coffee tours.

This research suggests that tourists’ primary focus on summit climbing hinders a broader engagement with Kilimanjaro’s biodiversity. By expanding tourism offerings to include more nature-focused walks, tourists’ connection with nature could be strengthened, potentially fostering greater appreciation of biodiversity and conservation efforts.