We used the carbon carrying capacity as an indicator of environmental productivity, clarified the emission reduction thresholds and measures for achieving a carbon neutral tourism destination, and proposed a simple, objective, and universal method for estimating the carbon budget of forest tourism scenic spots with function of both carbon sinks and carbon emissions. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Guidelines for Greenhouse Gas Inventories and the Climate Friendly Parks tool, a carbon emissions list with a clear border and relatively complete content was established to characterize the negative impact of tourism activities on the environment. Forest resource inventory data and the CO2Fix method could be used to accurately calculate the carbon sinks of forest tourism scenic spots. In 2019, the total CO2 emissions in Shenyang National Forest Park were 1841.445 t. The amount of CO2 sequestered by the forest was 1336.787 t, accounting for 72.59% of the total CO2 emissions. Thus, tourism had a net CO2 deficit of 504.658 t. Electricity consumption, garbage disposal, raw coal consumption, infrastructure construction, and land-use changes of forestland were the top five sources of CO2 emissions. The augmentation of the carbon pool could be improved by 65.358% of the total budget through forest management. The reduction aims of 133.41%–150.32% could be easily reached through emissions-cutting measures. Based on these results, we suggest several measures for low-carbon sustainable tourism.
Forests are an important source of ecosystem services, and they are a common link between economic value and environmental protection. Thus, it is of great significance to study forest ecosystem services. In previous studies, scholars have focused on the evaluation results of a single service component, but they did not consider the credibility of the data, which consisted of the cumulative effects of multiple components on forest ecosystem services. The current study examined the forest management plan for Jilin Province and used forest resource inventory data from China. Reliability analysis and cumulative impact assessment were used to overcome the problem of cumulative changes and interactions between services in order to make the evaluation results more objective and reasonable. The results showed that the resulting two values from the evaluation of forest ecosystem services had no obvious cumulative effect, and the evaluation value for overall reliability was 0.774, which confirms that the results have a certain credibility. The results of this study considered the cumulative effect of forest ecosystem services on the value evaluation. The total value of the service was equal to the sum of each service value, which might be primarily related to the data format and sample size used in this study. The innovation of this research lies in the consideration of data reliability and the cumulative influence of the services on the value evaluation process, which makes up for the shortcomings of previous service value evaluation methods. However, the limitation of this study is that multiple reference groups and control groups were not set up to verify that the inconsistency in the evaluation results was indeed due to the data format and sample size. Future research will focus on comparative studies of data types and sample sizes. Furthermore, future research will identify important service mechanisms and discuss the establishment of a forest ecological benefit compensation system to fundamentally solve the problems of power and mechanism associated with forest management, especially with respect to public welfare forests, in order to achieve a positive impact on the development of sustainable forestry in China.INDEX TERMS Cumulative impact assessment (CIA), forest ecosystem services, Jilin Province, reliability analysis.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.