Nature tourism assessment in the Icelandic Master Plan for geothermal and hydropower development. Part I: rapid evaluation of nature tourism resources

Abstract

The Icelandic government is currently carrying out a project called Master Plan for geothermal and hydropower development where all major potential hydropower and geothermal power plant projects in Iceland are being evaluated and ranked. One part of the project is to evaluate the effects of the power plants on tourism and recreation. In this paper, the method developed for this purpose is presented where the value of tourist destinations is evaluated. The country was divided into 57 tourism regions. A group of 8 specialists was asked to evaluate 43 attributes that were considered important for tourism and recreation and rank the tourism regions. The relevant regions have very different properties which make it difficult to select attributes that are relevant in all regions. This was overcome by using a large common set of attributes, but only taking into the total score in each region the score for the attributes that get the highest scores. In this way, the attributes important in each region are identified and compose the score for the present value of each tourism region.