Natural resources capacity to secure the travel, wellness, and leisure activity in the Carpathian region of Ukraine

Abstract

The article analyzes the natural resources capacity to secure travel, wellness, and leisure activity in the oblasts of the Carpathian region across the parameters of the area of forests, other forested lands, agricultural lands, surface waters, mountain areas, and the objects of the natural reserve fund. The analysis results show that a) the largest areas of forests and other forested lands are concentrated in Zakarpatska, Lvivska, and Ivano-Frankivska oblasts, while somewhat smaller – in Chernivetska; b) the largest areas of agricultural lands are in Lvivska oblast, they are much smaller in the rest of the oblasts; c) the largest areas of the surface water objects are recorded in Lvivska oblast, they are somewhat smaller in the rest of oblasts; d) mountain areas cover large territories in Zakarpatska and Ivano-Frnakivska oblasts and much smaller in Lvivska and Chernivetska oblasts; e) there are significant areas of territories and objects of the natural reserve fund in Ivano-Frankivska, Zakarpatska, and Lvivska oblasts, and they are the smallest in Chernivetska oblast. The article offers to assess the competitive advantages of securing the coverage of the population of the oblasts in the region with the travel, wellness, and leisure natural resources based on the total partial indices, while that of the region – based on the integral index. The scale is offered according to the values of the total partial index parameters calculated as an aggregate of partial indices of the population coverage with travel, wellness, and leisure natural or natural-anthropogenic resources in the Carpathian region. The analysis of the scale shows that in competitive advantages of the oblasts’ population coverage with the described resources, Zakarpatska and Ivano-Frankivska oblasts are ranked first and second, while Chernivetska and Lvivska oblasts are third and fourth, respectively. The article emphasizes that travel and wellness types of tourism focused on the combination of wellness balneological and recreational (landscape biological and hydrological diversity) resources and leisure tourism – science tourism, rural tourism, ski tourism in plain landscape locations, extreme tourism, etc. – remain to be prospective for the development in the oblasts of the Carpathian region.