A study on the sustainable development evaluation of water tourism

Abstract

The essential requirement for sustainable development is to meet the needs of contemporary people, but not to damage the ability development that satisfies the requirements of future generations. The realization of quantitative evaluation lays the foundation for implementing the strategy of sustainable development. The sustainable development evaluation system for water tourism can be divided into five subsystems, namely, sustainable economic development, sustainable social development, sustainable environmental development,sustainable management development, and development conditions and potentials. Composed of 28 index factors, this evaluation system measures index weight coefficients by using AHP with the support of entropy technology. By conducting an empirical study on three typical water tourism destinations(National Water Conservancy Scenic Spots) in Nanjing, this study indicates the sustainable development level rankings of the three destinations, that is, Taurus Lake(0.896), Pearl Spring(0.883) and Outer Qinhuai River(0.796) respectively. The Jinniu Lake is particularly outstanding with respect to the environment, while the Pearl Spring ranks first in other aspects. The Outer Qinhuai River is superior to others in terms of development conditions and potential, however, it is inferior to others in the remaining aspects. Aiming at specific evaluation data, this paper proposes policy recommendations for the three destinations with regard to sustainable development requiring urgent improvement.