Complex Interrelationships between Ecosystem Services Supply and Tourism Demand: General Framework and Evidence from the Origin of Three Asian Rivers

Abstract

Over the past two decades, the demands of nature-based tourism have been rapidly growing worldwide, yet it is not clear how tourist demands for water, food, and infrastructure influence the ecosystem services (ES), which are often the bedrock of an area’s economic, cultural, and natural wealth. With a general conceptual model that applies the telecoupling framework, this study identifies complex interrelationships between the demand for nature-based tourism, which is a type of cultural ES, ES supply, and the economy simultaneously, using China’s Qinghai Province as a demonstration site. The province is the origin of three rivers, making it crucial for water retention and prime for tourism. The results indicate that there is a strong spatial interaction between the number of tourism attractions and water retention. The southern Qinghai region’s natural resources are protected by the Sanjiangyuan (three rivers headwater) National Park. From 2010–2014, tourists in the Sanjiangyuan region spent more money than those in the northern Qinghai region, which has accelerated the development of tourism infrastructures. The Sanjiangyuan region may face the unexpected degradation of its natural habitats due to rapid tourism development. Our findings suggest that new management plans are needed to minimize the negative impacts from the demands of distant tourists, and preserve the region that supports both the environment and the economy.

International Tourism Dynamics in a Globalized World: A Social Network Analysis Approach

“…Within a given country, protected areas have varying success in attracting international tourists from different regions and over time (Diefendorf et al 2012; Su and Lin 2014). Some protected areas have higher levels of domestic tourist arrivals than international tourist arrivals (Chung et al 2018a), whereas other protected areas attract more international tourists than domestic tourists (Baral et al 2017). These varying patterns of international tourist arrivals may have led to an insignificant result in the mixed effects model.…”

“…World Natural Heritage sites were excluded to avoid double counting a site. Protected areas and World Cultural Heritage sites were used to represent a country’s cultural ecosystem services (Balmford et al 2015; Chung et al 2018a; Yang, Lin, and Han 2010).…”

The spatial and temporal dynamics of global meat trade networks

“…Second, countries may be metacoupled (e.g., through trade between adjacent countries and between distant countries) 47 , and a shorter distance between sending and receiving countries plays a crucial role in increasing meat trade 6 . Distance has also been shown to be very important in the trade of other products 48,49 , as well as in other human activities such as global fishing 50 , tourism [51][52][53] , and flows of ecosystem services [54][55][56] . Third, income level and population size have been found to be important determinants of global meat trade 1,2 .…”

Telecoupled impacts of livestock trade on non-communicable diseases

“…This telecoupling framework allows analysis of the socioeconomic and environmental interconnections among two or more coupled human and natural systems over long distances [29]. This framework has been applied to a variety of important issues, such as trade (of food, energy, sand, and forest products) [30–33], land use and land cover change [34–36], species migration [37], tourism [32, 38], water transfer [39, 40], urbanization [41], wildlife transfer [32], foreign direct investment [42], payment for ecosystem services [43, 44], knowledge transfer [32], conservation [43–45], economic development [46], and fisheries [47, 48]. This is the first time, however, that this framework has been used in the context of livestock production, trade, consumption, and human health.…”