The Establishment and Application of Environment Sustainability Evaluation Indicators for Ecotourism Environments

Han-Shen Chen
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Han-Shen Chen: School of Health Diet and Industry Management, Chung Shan Medical University, No.110, Sec.1, Jianguo N. Rd. Taichung 40201, Taiwan

Sustainability, 2015, vol. 7, issue 4, 1-20

Abstract: Kinmen National Park is the only battle memorial-themed natural resource conservation park in Taiwan. With the rapid growth in tourism, Kinmen National Park faces the challenge of managing with the resulting environmental impact. For this study, we adopted the tourism ecological footprint (TEF) and tourism ecological capacity (TEC) to evaluate the ecological conditions of Kinmen National Park from 2002 to 2011. The empirical results indicated the following findings: (a) TEF increased by 8.03% over 10 years; (b) Regarding the environmental sustainability index (ESI), per capita tourism ecological deficit (PTED) yielded a deficit growth rate of 45.37%. In 2011, the ecological footprint index (EFI) was at Level 4 with 1.16, and the ESI was at Level 3 with 0.495. According to the aforementioned results, with the increased scale of tourism to Kinmen National Park, the pressure that ecological occupancy exerted on the national ecosystem exceeded its ecological capacity.

Keywords: ecotourism; sustainable development; ecological footprint index (EFI); environmental sustainability index (ESI) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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