旅游生态足迹:测度旅游可持续发展的新方法

Touristic ecological footprint:a new yardstick to assess sustainability of tourism

生态足迹分析方法是近年发展起来的一种主要用面积来定量测度人类对自然资源利用程度和可持续发展的新方法。旅游生态足迹是生态足迹理念在旅游研究中的应用,有助于对旅游活动的生态需求与环境影响关系的理解,可以用面积来对旅游可持续发展进行定量测度。论述旅游生态足迹基本概念,并以线路旅游产品为例,在阐述生态足迹的计算步骤和方法的基础之上,主要探讨旅游生态足迹在旅游可持续发展中6个方面的测度功能旅游产业、旅游产品、旅游目的地、企业生态、旅游者及大众旅游,对旅游生态足迹的进一步研究具有重要理论指导意义。

Assessment of tourism's sustainability presents many problems. One of the key problem is how to measure environmental impacts of tourism activity. In the past, a number concepts and methods have been used to evaluate the environmental consequences of tourism. These include tourism environmental bearing capacity(TEBC), environmental impact assessments (EIA),and the limits of acceptable change system (LAC). However, these techniques focus on changes occurring on the local environment, large ignoring the global consequences and whole biosphere impact of tourism, and these methods become too complicated. On the other hand, touristic ecological footprint(TEF), which is application of the ecological footprint (EF) in tourism not only overcomes this weakness, but provides a measure of demands upon the biological productivity of tourism activity. The ecological footprint is the area of productive land andwater which support both their consumption and disposal of waste. TEF introduces a concept of area to explain that tourists resource consumption through all tourism activity, and this measure is universal,and can be used for direct comparison. Base on this concept, this paper then illuminates calculating step and method through a case of ecological footprint of the tourism product: (1)Tourists' resource consumption and the land area can be divided into ‘food consumption', ‘accommodation', ‘transport', ‘sight-seeing', “purchase” and “entertainment”; (2) the calculation of the land area on biological productivity; (3) calculation of TEF. In conclusion, this paper discusses six kinds of functions of TEF: (1) TEF has the function of evaluating tourism industry. It can be used to compare the tourism industry with regarding sustainability by comparing resources consume different industries (2) TEF has the function of evaluating tourism production. Tourism products and the resources they consumption are different, so their EF is different. It allows compassion between different types of tourism product in terms of overall ecological performance. (3) TEF has the function of evaluating tourism destination area. Tourists necessarily consume the resources and the energy of the destination area, and through EF analysis, we can assess the resources and energy consumption in the destination area. (4) TEF has the function of evaluating the tourism enterprise. Every enterprise will consume different resources and amounts of energy, then the EF of each tourist in tourism enterprise is different. EF can be an integral part of the tourism sustainability index system, and we determine the ecological demands of different tourism enterprises. (5)TEF has function in tourists education. The concept of TEF is simple and clear. As a tourist, he can understand clearly the consumed and waste produced of different tourism activities and he may gain increased awareness of environmental protection through this process. (6) TEF has the function of evaluating the mass tourism and ecotourism. Many people always think that the mass tourism is unsustainable and the ecotourism is sustainable. Through EF analysis of the effects of mass and ecotourism, this view should be doubled.