Ecotourism Environmental Protection Measures and Their Effects on Protected Areas in China

Abstract

Ecological and environmental protection is the core content of ecotourism development. A quantitative evaluation of the effects of ecotourism environmental protection (hereinafter referred to as EEP) measures on protected areas is conducive to a deeper understanding of the key issues related to ecotourism development in China, thus providing the theoretical basis for formulating the relevant national policies of sustainable ecotourism development in China. This paper first discusses the evaluation index system and then establishes an index evaluation model of EEP measures and their effects on protected areas. Using surveys of more than 1110 protected areas in 27 provinces (autonomous regions or municipalities), we evaluated the EEP measures and their effects from a quantitative and spatial perspective. The completeness of EEP measures for Chinese protected areas was moderately effective, and the implementation status of the protection measures varied with the protection region. The effectiveness of EEP measures in different provinces and regions showed significant differences. The effectiveness decreased from east to west. The evaluation index values of the environmental protection measures displayed a high correlation with the effects of environmental protection on protected areas. The ecological protection measures should be further improved and strengthened according to their regional differences during ecotourism development.

Ecotourism in China, Misuse or Genuine Development? An Analysis Based on Map Browser Results

“…The fact that most ecotourism sites are found in the richer provinces makes sense to a certain extent. Higher GDP allows for increased investment and development potential, so that these provinces can develop ecotourism in their natural areas while lower GDP provinces are still struggling to expand facilities due to limited funding [54]. In general, the high number of scenic sites touting labels of "ecotourism" demonstrate that the concept of ecotourism has been widely adopted in China, reflecting the positive perception of the concept by the Chinese population, which has treated it as a huge marketing opportunity.…”

“…Unfortunately, as previously mentioned for other regions of the world, the apparent success of ecotourism development has not come without cost. Although extensive survey results over the majority of provinces in mainland China have reported a positive ecotourism development performance in forest parks [51] with some differences among provinces [54], several studies have found increasing pressure on natural resources and damage to ecosystems due to an excessively large numbers of visitors [55], poor behavior of tourists [56] and inadequate management at several administrative levels [46,54,57,58]. Moreover, other fundamental aims of the ecotourism model such as the fair distribution of income among stakeholders and the environmental awareness of tourists, were rarely achieved [36,[59][60][61][62].…”

“…With this paper we assessed the current conditions of shengtai lüyou in mainland China in a different way from previously published works, which mainly focused on available literature [48], analysis of government policies [52,54], empirical knowledge of the authors [60], or on field surveys of individual case studies [36,56,58,59,63]. Focusing on ecotourism supply, we have proposed a synoptic view over the distribution pattern of shengtai lüyou locations in China, using data retrieved from browsing freely available domestic map services, and comparing the results with the distribution of natural hotspots and socio-economic variables.…”

Untitled

“…The industry accounts for more than 10% of global employment and more than 11% of global GDP (The Mountain Institute, 2000). Furthermore, development policy makers view tourism as a mechanism for achieving socio-economic progress thus total trips of tourist will further increase (Madzara, 2011;Barry, 2012;Wang et al, 2014).…”

Contributions of local guidance practices to the natural environment, protected areas and local people

“…The attention is now more focused on the protected areas particularly due to the changing approach to the mass tourism and tendency to move away from the usual tourism attractions (Marzouki et al, 2012). Such an increased interest has led to the emergence of the concept of ecotourism since ecotourism adopts the principles of protecting the natural areas, providing economic contributions to local people and living in an environmentally-conscious manner (Bushell and Eagles, 2007;Korkmaz and Başkalkan, 2011;Akyol and Tolunay, 2012;Wang, 2014).…”