TY - JOUR
T1 - Drivers and socioeconomic impacts of tourism participation in protected areas
AU - Liu, Wei
AU - Vogt, Christine
AU - Luo, Junyan
AU - He, Guangming
AU - Frank, Kenneth A.
AU - Liu, Jianguo
N1 - Funding Information:
Funding: Funding for this research was provided by National Science Foundation (NSF Award Numbers 0709717 and OISE-0729709) and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA Award Number NNX08AL04G). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Funding Information:
In 1979 the reserve became one of China’s first three UNESCO biosphere reserves [56]. From then on the conservation issues in the reserve started to receive extensive attention both domestically and internationally. In 1983 the Chinese central government designated the reserve as the nation’s first special district for nature conservation, where conservation and development are practiced and managed by the same administrative unit. The Wolong Special District Administration Bureau received direct financial support from the central government and reported to both China’s Ministry of Forestry and the Sichuan provincial government. Unprecedented level of funding from the central government helped improve the infrastructure in the area during the 1980s, including the construction of six conservation stations inside and outside the reserve [47]. An international collaboration on panda conservation between China’s Ministry of Forestry and World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in early 1980s also resulted in the establishment of the world’s largest in-captive panda breeding and research facility in the reserve, which was later named China Center for Research and Conservation of Giant Pandas (Panda center in Figure 1). Between 1984 and 1986 an aid of 887,000 US dollars from World Food Programme (WFP) with a matching fund from China’s central government was provided to the reserve to carry out a series of infrastructure construction and forest restoration projects [47].
Publisher Copyright:
ß 2012 Liu et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
PY - 2012/4
Y1 - 2012/4
N2 - Nature-based tourism has the potential to enhance global biodiversity conservation by providing alternative livelihood strategies for local people, which may alleviate poverty in and around protected areas. Despite the popularity of the concept of nature-based tourism as an integrated conservation and development tool, empirical research on its actual socioeconomic benefits, on the distributional pattern of these benefits, and on its direct driving factors is lacking, because relevant long-term data are rarely available. In a multi-year study in Wolong Nature Reserve, China, we followed a representative sample of 220 local households from 1999 to 2007 to investigate the diverse benefits that these households received from recent development of nature-based tourism in the area. Within eight years, the number of households directly participating in tourism activities increased from nine to sixty. In addition, about two-thirds of the other households received indirect financial benefits from tourism. We constructed an empirical household economic model to identify the factors that led to household-level participation in tourism. The results reveal the effects of local households’ livelihood assets (i.e., financial, human, natural, physical, and social capitals) on the likelihood to participate directly in tourism. In general, households with greater financial (e.g., income), physical (e.g., access to key tourism sites), human (e.g., education), and social (e.g., kinship with local government officials) capitals and less natural capital (e.g., cropland) were more likely to participate in tourism activities. We found that residents in households participating in tourism tended to perceive more non-financial benefits in addition to more negative environmental impacts of tourism compared with households not participating in tourism. These findings suggest that socioeconomic impact analysis and change monitoring should be included in nature-based tourism management systems for long-term sustainability of protected areas.
AB - Nature-based tourism has the potential to enhance global biodiversity conservation by providing alternative livelihood strategies for local people, which may alleviate poverty in and around protected areas. Despite the popularity of the concept of nature-based tourism as an integrated conservation and development tool, empirical research on its actual socioeconomic benefits, on the distributional pattern of these benefits, and on its direct driving factors is lacking, because relevant long-term data are rarely available. In a multi-year study in Wolong Nature Reserve, China, we followed a representative sample of 220 local households from 1999 to 2007 to investigate the diverse benefits that these households received from recent development of nature-based tourism in the area. Within eight years, the number of households directly participating in tourism activities increased from nine to sixty. In addition, about two-thirds of the other households received indirect financial benefits from tourism. We constructed an empirical household economic model to identify the factors that led to household-level participation in tourism. The results reveal the effects of local households’ livelihood assets (i.e., financial, human, natural, physical, and social capitals) on the likelihood to participate directly in tourism. In general, households with greater financial (e.g., income), physical (e.g., access to key tourism sites), human (e.g., education), and social (e.g., kinship with local government officials) capitals and less natural capital (e.g., cropland) were more likely to participate in tourism activities. We found that residents in households participating in tourism tended to perceive more non-financial benefits in addition to more negative environmental impacts of tourism compared with households not participating in tourism. These findings suggest that socioeconomic impact analysis and change monitoring should be included in nature-based tourism management systems for long-term sustainability of protected areas.
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U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0035420
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0035420
M3 - Article
C2 - 22558149
AN - SCOPUS:84865843721
SN - 1932-6203
VL - 7
JO - PLoS One
JF - PLoS One
IS - 4 April
M1 - e0035420
ER -