How many cave divers in the world

[Danseur]

..and all of Europe, Asia, South and Central America, Australia and Africa.....

[350xfire]

I think I'm the only one in my neighborhood and at work...lol

[RebreatherPro.com]

We just returned from a trip to Australia and dived several systems with the CDAA. More on that at our website in the signature.
The CDS/NACD are a good place to start, but as stated in previous posts, there are likely thousands of cave divers who simply dive caves--without certs or agency membership.
Just to confuse the issue further--we have shipped cave diving books to:
USA
Lebanon
Oman
Iraq
Finland
Thailand
Canada
Philippines
Egypt
Syria
Australia
Great Britain
Mexico
Portugal
France
Israel
Sweden
Ireland
Denmark
Antarctica
Blah, blah, blah...we assume there are actual cave divers in these locations. Many of whom have never been to the USA and don't belong to any certifying organization.
It would be a good project for a graduate student to undertake...as long as they share their findings with the caving community.

[MORGAN]

It would be a good project for a graduate student to undertake...as long as they share their findings with the caving community.

Yes - those grad students need to be kept busy!

Mike

[DrHarry]

Jill it was a delight to have you and some other international cave divers in Australia for our dive show "OzTek", and some cave diving to follow. A great pleasure to meet you and Robert. Glad to hear your honeymoon was fun!

I believe we have about 700 cave divers on the books in Australia at present, of which maybe (a guess) half dive fairly regularly. Seems you see/hear about maybe 100 divers who do most of the diving however.

[phillip1]

So about 6000-7000 worldwide with less than half active roughly

[icestac]

So about 6000-7000 worldwide with less than half active roughly

I am also curious on the number of cave divers, but I am not seeing where you got these numbers from. Would you please share?

Thanks,
~Jeff

X = Divers in Oz
Y = Divers in World

X * 10 = Y

[ShagMan]

I'd love to see some stats too, but talk about something hard to nail down.

Counting up NACD,NSS-CDS,IANTD etc. would be one thing, but that's not a good count of active divers.

A lot of divers work from cash, and so wouldn't be registered by name anywhere like one of the dive shops.

How would you get a count??

So I'm seeing a guess of like 1,000 to 4,000 very roughly, which is probably a high number IMO.

[icestac]

I'd be happy to just start with something easy to count, like the actual number of certified cave divers across all agencies. Yes, some divers don't get certified and some don't dive anymore, but at least there would be some method to verify and get a baseline count.

~Jeff

[Polly]

If you counted all of the different people who got fills at these places over a two or three year period, you'd be on the way to having an idea of how many active cave divers there are.

Then you'd be left with figuring out how many are active elsewhere but don't come to that area. (or didn't during the period studied)

I think couples who dive might skew these numbers too. We just have a single account at Amigos, CE & CEE, & CA not to leave DO out, but I don't think Cathy has ever taken our names when we've gotten fills there. As I write this I'm also thinking that unless you actually got the customer lists from these places, you'd have a lot of people counted multiple times.

I would think the agencies would be the best place to get the info. Not a whole lot of people getting full cave certs from both NSS and NACD, GUE probably has statistically significant numbers, PADI, NAUI and the others that have jumped on the cave bandwagon probably don't. I would guess uncertified divers and inactive divers would come close to balancing each other out.

I agree a head count would be an interesting factoid!