The Coupling and Coordination Relationship between Leisure Tourism and Ecological Environment: The Case of Ili Region in Xinjiang Province

Rumei Qiu, Bin Wen () and Yang Qiu
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Rumei Qiu: Faculty of Physical Education, Huaibei Normal University, Huaibei 235000, China
Bin Wen: Faculty of History, Culture and Tourism, Huaibei Normal University, Huaibei 235000, China
Yang Qiu: Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Lanzhou 730030, China

Sustainability, 2023, vol. 15, issue 16, 1-17

Abstract: There is no doubt that a coupling relationship between leisure tourism and the ecological environment exists, but how to realize their coordinated development on that basis is much less clear. In this paper, taking Xinjiang’s Ili region as the research object, we first established a leisure tourism and ecological environment evaluation index system using the mean-variance method to assign its weighting and then built a coupling coordination model. In this way, the coupling and coordination relationship between leisure tourism and the ecological environment of the Ili region over a recent 20-year period (2001–2020) was analyzed in depth. Our results show that the economic benefit of leisure tourism and the efficiency of ecological environment protection contribute most, respectively, to the leisure tourism and ecological environment subsystems. During the study period, the coupling and coordination of leisure tourism and ecological environment system in the Ili area could be divided into five types, namely, “serious disorder-system balanced development”, “moderate disorder-leisure tourism lags”, “near disorder-leisure tourism lags”, “barely coordination-leisure tourism lags’, and “primary coordination-system balanced development”. The comprehensive development level of leisure tourism has exceeded that of the ecological environment, and prominent ecological and environmental problems have gradually arisen. Therefore, when vigorously developing leisure tourism, we should pay more attention to the ecological environment’s problems so as to realize the sustainable, coordinated development of the two.

Keywords: leisure tourism; ecological environment; coupling and coordination; Ili region (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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