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.
Highlights
Ecotourism has obtained global attention since it was officially coined in an international environmental conference held in Mexico in 1986 [1,2]
We investigated the current situation of environmental protection (EEP) in protected areas and their spatial differences in China
Comprehensive Index Analysis of the EEP Measures in Protected Areas of China In China, the overall rating score of the EEP measures in protected areas is 0.572, indicating that the implementation of the EEP measures is at a moderate level
Summary
Ecotourism has obtained global attention since it was officially coined in an international environmental conference held in Mexico in 1986 [1,2]. It has become a popular section of the tourism industry in many countries [3]. Organization, ecotourism will become one of the largest industries in the world in the future [5]. Ecological and environmental protection is the core component of ecotourism. The relationship between ecotourism and eco-environmental protection has been studied intensively [9,10,11,12,13].
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