Integrating Ecosystem Services and Eco-Security to Assess Sustainable Development in Liuqiu Island

Abstract

Abstract:Developing sustainable island tourism must be thoroughly evaluated in consideration of ecological, economic, and social factors on account of the fragility of island ecosystems. This study evaluated the ecological footprint (EF) and ecological capacity of Liuqiu Island from 2010 to 2015 using the EF model, establishing an indicator to estimate the value of ecosystem service and eco-security. The empirical results include: (1) the overall value of ecosystem service on Liuqiu Island increased from US$3.75 million in 2010 to US$5.11 million in 2015; (2) the total per capita EF considerably increased from 0.5640 gha/person in 2010 to 4.0845 gha/person in 2015; and (3) the ecological footprint index increased from 0.30 in 2010 to 2.28 in 2015. These findings indicate that island tourism recreational zones gradually increased the pressure on its ecosystem, reduced the eco-security level, and severely damaged the environment, thereby threatening the function and structure of the entire ecosystem. The innovations and contributions of this study is integrating ecological footprint and ecosystem services valuation provide insights into sustainability of an island. The theoretical and practical implications identified in this study should contribute to reducing the gap between research and practice.

Issues in Energy Vulnerability Assessment: Looking for a Sustainable Choice of Natural Resource for Power Generation

“…However, as this analysis considers only the capture of the solar resource (and not the manufacture of the necessary implements to do so), it is understood that it is a clean energy, which stands out exponentially when compared to energy from HCs: Resources that, as discussed above, cause a wide variety of environmental impacts, which irreversibly compromise the ability of future generations to meet their own needs, endangering the EV of the AGBS system [6][7][8][72][73][74][75]79]. It is known that various reviews and studies are carried out around the world about EV (with varying degrees of analysis and accuracy, published or not), aiming at the diffuse goal of sustainable development and others such as the objectives of the millennium, as found in [18,19,21,22,31,32,34,80].…”

“…Thus, through this kind of analysis, decision makers are equipped with one more tool to optimize the use of natural resources through sustainable development. Sustainable development is classically defined as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs [3,6,[17][18][19][20][21][22]. Thus, this study analyzes, through EV, disturbances in the environment caused by anthropic activities for the production of energy resources, focusing on the power generation sector.…”

Integrated Evaluation of Coupling Coordination for Land Use Change and Ecological Security: A Case Study in Wuhan City of Hubei Province, China

“…Chen, H.S. et al evaluated the ecological footprint and ecological capacity by using ecological footprint model to estimate the value of ecosystem service and ecological security [ 52 ]. But, the method of ecological footprint ignored the impacts of air and water pollution on ecological environment, which cannot accurately evaluate the level of ecological security.…”

Nouveauté or Cliché? Assessment on island ecological vulnerability to Tourism: Application to Zhoushan, China

“…Secondly, tourism is supposed to impose negative effects on a certain range of insular ecological systems to accommodate tourists flocking to islands and upholding a high profile in the global tourist industry. The idea of socioecological systems has only recently been employed in examining island tourism relations, especially in the Chinese insular context, including Liuqiu Island (Chen et al, 2017a) and Zhoushan Archipelago (Chen et al, 2017b;Gu, 2017). Thirdly, islands are inherently regarded as vulnerable to external disturbance, and therefore a bunch of studies have investigated the level of vulnerability of islands to tourism.…”