Abstract
PurposeThe development of tourism around Wolong Nature Reserve changes the local communities' ways of life. This study discusses how ecotourism affects the households' use of their capitals, the livelihood strategies as well as illustrates the impact on the habitats in the reserve through Department for International Development’s (DFID) Sustainable Livelihood Framework (SLF) with data collected during fieldwork.Design/methodology/approachThe study focuses on (1) Calculating Livelihood Capital Index. (2) The effects of livelihood capitals on livelihood strategy were calculated by multinomial logistic regression.FindingsThe study has yielded the following results: (1) In general, tourism promotes people's livelihood capitals. The growth in different types of households under tourism settings is ranked as full-time tourism operators > part-time tourism operators > traditional living households. (2) Tourism development mainly shifts livelihood strategies in two ways. Firstly, travel operating replaces some traditional practices that make livings; secondly, increased needs for potherbs and herbs from tourists let households enter into the hills to pick the plants more actively, which intensifies the destruction of giant panda's habitats. (3) Nine types of livelihood capitals indicators, namely farmland quality, distance between house and roads, number of laborers, average housing area, average income per person, whether family members being village cadres, and ever having received skills training shape livelihood strategies in different levels.Originality/valueThree discussions are drawn from the study: (1) Enhancing the exploit for tourism resources to form a diversified competition. (2) Introducing herb growing to fulfill tourists' needs and improve people's livelihood in the meantime. (3) Optimizing the tourism surveillance and management system and improving the rules and regulations.
Highlights
All types of households have seen an increase of their livelihood capitals after tourism development
4.1 A conclusion of the study Taking Wolong Nature Reserve as research area and the data collected from fieldwork, the study conducts an analysis over the influence of tourism development on the rural households’ livelihood around the area and its relation with habitats conservation under Sustainable Livelihood Framework (SLF)
The Livelihood Capital Index (LCI) of the farmers who mainly work on tourism increases most rapidly, otherwise the livelihood index of the traditional farmers changes in the most non-obvious speed at the individual level
Summary
With the continuous development and progress of human civilization, the standard of human life and the requirements for the quality of life are constantly improving. People pay more attention to ecology and tourism (Lu, 1996). In recent years, ecotourism, based on good ecological environment, has developed rapidly in the world (Deng and Liu, 2020). The protected areas have become the main carrier of ecotourism because of their rich tourism resources (Costa et al, 2016). According to the estimates of the International Ecotourism Association, the world’s Natural Ecotourism revenue grows at the rate of 10–12% every year, which has become an important direction of tourism in the 21st century. In Nepal (Regmi and Walter, 2017), India (Ghosh-Harihar et al, 2019), Kenya (Cheung, 2015) and Forestry Economics Review Vol 4 No 1, 2022 pp.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
