Impacts of national parks on tourism: a case study from a prominent alpine national park

Author(s):  
Michael Getzner

-National parks and other categories of protected areas are often assumed to enhance regional economic development due to park tourism. The current study attempts to estimate the impact of the Hohe Tauern national park (Austria) on tourism by exploring whether and to what extent the national park may have had an influence on tourism development. For most national park communities, the results suggest that the establishment of the national park had some impact by enforcing an already positive trend or by weakening or reversing a negative trend of tourism. However, breakpoint tests exhibit turning points up to several years after the establishment of the park, indicating that taking a national park as the basis for tourism development is a medium to long term development strategy. In the short term, the impact of a national park on tourism is not measurable. Tourism increased by 1 to 3% annually after the breakpoint, indicating that the establishment of a national park has to be incorporated into the tourism and development strategy of a region right from the start. The causal relationship between the establishment of the national park and tourism development may be weak, in particular in communities where the difference between the actual and the forecast numbers of overnight stays is small. Marketing national park tourism and building up a brand or distinctive label may therefore contribute to regional development particularly in the long term.Key words: Tourism, national park, protected area, time series, stationarity, breakpoint test, ARIMA.JEL classifications: R110, L830, C220.Parole chiave: Turismo, parco nazionale, area protetta, serie temporale, stazionarietŕ, test di breakpoint, ARIMA.

Author(s):  
N. Qwynne Lackey ◽  
Kelly Bricker

Concessioners play an important role in park and protected area management by providing visitor services. Historically, concessioners were criticized for their negative impacts on environmental sustainability. However, due to policy changes, technological advances, and shifting market demands, there is a need to reevaluate the role of concessioners in sustainable destination management in and around parks and protected areas. The purpose of this qualitative case study situated in Grand Teton National Park (GTNP), which was guided by social exchange theory, was to explore U.S. national park concessioners’ influence on sustainable development at the destination level from the perspective of National Park Service (NPS) staff, concessioners, and local community members. Sustainability was examined holistically as a multifaceted construct with integrated socioeconomic, cultural, and environmental dimensions. Twenty-three participants completed semistructured interviews. Researchers identified four thematic categories describing concessioners’ influence on sustainability; motivations and barriers to pursuing sustainability initiatives; and situational factors that facilitated concessioners’ sustainability actions. While participants commented on the negative environmental impacts of concessioners and their operations, these data suggest that concessioners were working individually and collaboratively to promote environmental, socioeconomic, and cultural sustainability in and around GTNP. Some concessioners were even described as leaders, testing and driving the development of innovative sustainability policies and practices. These actions were motivated, in part, by contractual obligations and profit generation. However, concessioners also had strong intangible motivators, such as intrinsic values and a strong sense of community, that drove their positive contributions to sustainability. Based on these data, we recommend that those involved in future theoretical and practical work with concessioners acknowledge the importance of both tangible and intangible motivators when attempting to promote higher levels of sustainability achievement and collaboration. This will become increasingly important as land management agencies continue to embrace strategies beyond the traditional “parks as islands” approach to management. Additionally, future work should explore more specifically the role of policy, conceptualizations of sustainability, and private industry sponsorship in promoting concessioners’ contributions to sustainability, especially in collaborative settings. This work is needed to understand if and how these observations generalize to other contexts.


Author(s):  
Nataliya Sergeevna Kholodkovskaya

The long-term strategic goal of Russia is the sustainable development of its regions. Recreational resources are able to create conditions for sustainable development of the region, the importance of which is due to the fact that on the one hand they are the basis and source of economic restructuring and its modernization, and on the other, they have an impact on social factors of sustainable development. National parks, being one of the important forms of natural and recreational resources, can become the initiators and centers of active dissemination of sustainable development strategy in the surrounding areas. The paper studies the impact of alternative use of the potential of national parks in the formation of sustainable development of the region. As a factorial feature, the share of the area of the national Park in the region of its location from the entire area of the region was made, as a result - indicators corresponding to the economic, social and environmental spheres of sustainable development of the region. The indicators of the resulting indicators of the economic sphere of development of the region were selected: GRP per capita, investment in fixed capital aimed at protecting the environment and the rational use of natural resources; current costs of environmental protection; social - morbidity rates per 1.000 people, the number of deaths per 1.000 people; life expectancy; environmental - the number of air samples studied exceeding the maximum allowable concentration as a percentage of the total number of samples studied. To measure the tightness of the relationship between certain indicators, the calculation of the empirical correlation ratio was applied. The calculations show the existence of links between the size of the national Park and economic, social and environmental indicators, thereby confirming the special functional role of recreational resources in the formation of the foundations of sustainable development of the region, which should now be considered as the basis and source of economic restructuring and modernization.


Turyzm ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 55-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Klimek

The Bieszczady mountains are one of the ranges of the Polish Carpathians. Their natural and cultural amenities attract thousands of Polish and international tourists each year. Despite many protected zones existing in this area (e.g. Bieszczadzki National Park, UNESCO Biosphere Reserve and Nature 2000 areas), the Bieszczady mountains face various environmental and social problems which have arisen from their dynamic but often chaotic tourism development. The lack of a common vision of long-term tourism development (on communal and regional levels) is one of the main challenging issues which public and private bodies are confronted with. The paper presents the results of the implementation of an innovative approach, i.e. the St. Gallen Model for Destination Management (SGDM), in selected Bieszczady communes. This method offers a clear advantage for key destination actors by allowing them to enter a process of holistic destination management. The article is the first attempt at SGDM application in Poland.


Author(s):  
Hajar BADA ◽  
Mohamed LAHKIM ◽  
Ahmed BELMOUDEN ◽  
Nadia El Kadmiri

In order to respond to climate change, the Chinese government has committed to reduce the intensity of its national GHG emissions by 2020. In contrast to expectations, this year has seen an unexpected tragedy in the form of the corona virus epidemic. This virus, which belongs to the SARS-COV-2 family, has created a global turmoil and led to a record number of infections and deaths. In this situation, China took refuge as the first country to announce the appearance of the virus, resorted to quarantine in the absence of a vaccine against the virus, declared a state of emergency and then led to the shutdown of the Chinese economy. With the increase in the number of infections and deaths several study had analyzing the connection between economic growth and covid-19 or public health and covid-19, while this paper focuses on the impact of COVID-19 on air quality, specifically the concentration of GHGs in the air resulting from industrial activities by comparing GHGs emissions in 2020 and previous years on the one hand, on the other hand, by analyzing the difference between the annual number of deaths caused by pollution and those caused by the virus. This mini review highlights the effect of long-term exposure to pollutants and the high risk of infection by the virus, China is taken as a case study, which evaluates the impact of COVID-19 on the environment.


Author(s):  
Michaela Antoušková

This paper focuses on comparison of two different elicitation formats commonly used in the Willingness-to-pay method. It compares the difference in influence of chosen respondents’ characteristics on their willingness to pay for evaluated non-market good applying the take-it-or-leave-it (single-bounded choice) and take-it-it-or-leave-it with follow-up (double-bounded choice) elicitation formats. The good evaluated in the presented article is recreation in nature-based areas. The research is conducted in two primer nature-based recreational areas in the Czech Republic (National Park Sumava, National Park Podyji). The data sources are gathered from a tourist survey carried out in both the studied areas. A logistic regression is used for evaluation of the results. Based on the analysed method, two models are developed. The binary model elaborates the take-it-or-leave-it approach and the ordinal model elaborates the extended approach – take-it-it-or-leave-it with follow-up. The influence of personal and socioeconomic tourists’ characteristics on their willingness to pay is predicted in both models and consequently compared. The predictors analysed include sex, age, education, frequency of visitation of studied areas, and total costs spent during the actual visit.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
David Western ◽  
Victor N. Mose ◽  
David Maitumo ◽  
Caroline Mburu

Abstract Background Studies of the African savannas have used national parks to test ecological theories of natural ecosystems, including equilibrium, non-equilibrium, complex adaptive systems, and the role of top-down and bottom-up physical and biotic forces. Most such studies have excluded the impact of pastoralists in shaping grassland ecosystems and, over the last half century, the growing human impact on the world’s rangelands. The mounting human impact calls for selecting indicators and integrated monitoring methods able to track ecosystem changes and the role of natural and human agencies. Our study draws on five decades of monitoring the Amboseli landscape in southern Kenya to document the declining role of natural agencies in shaping plant ecology with rising human impact. Results We show that plant diversity and productivity have declined, biomass turnover has increased in response to a downsizing of mean plant size, and that ecological resilience has declined with the rising probability of extreme shortfalls in pasture production. The signature of rainfall and physical agencies in driving ecosystem properties has decreased sharply with growing human impact. We compare the Amboseli findings to the long-term studies of Kruger and Serengeti national parks to show that the human influence, whether by design or default, is increasingly shaping the ecology of savanna ecosystems. We look at the findings in the larger perspective of human impact on African grasslands and the world rangelands, in general, and discuss the implications for ecosystem theory and conservation policy and management. Conclusions The Amboseli study shows the value of using long-term integrated ecological monitoring to track the spatial and temporal changes in the species composition, structure, and function of rangeland ecosystems and the role of natural and human agencies in the process of change. The study echoes the widespread changes underway across African savannas and world’s rangelands, concluding that some level of ecosystem management is needed to prevent land degradation and the erosion of ecological function, services, and resilience. Despite the weak application of ecological theory to conservation management, a plant trait-based approach is shown to be useful in explaining the macroecological changes underway.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (15) ◽  
pp. 8145
Author(s):  
Aleksandra Kuzior ◽  
Oleksii Lyulyov ◽  
Tetyana Pimonenko ◽  
Aleksy Kwilinski ◽  
Dariusz Krawczyk

The accepted Sustainable Development Goals aim at reorienting the tourism industry to sustainable tourism and enhancing post-industrial tourism. In this case, it is necessary to identify the statistically significant determinants which affect post-industrial tourism development. In this paper, we aim to analyse: (1) the impact of economic and environmental dimensions, and of digital marketing on supporting post-industrial tourism development and (2) the difference between attitude to post-industrial tourism on the gender, age, and education dimensions and digital channels on post-industrial tourism development. The data was collected from questioning 2334 respondents during April–November 2020. The study applied the following methods: frequencies, percentages, t-test, and one-way ANOVA and multiple regression analysis. The findings confirmed the statistically significant impact of the economic and environmental dimensions, as well as digital marketing on post-industrial tourism development. The results of the analysis justified that digital marketing was a catalysator of post-industrial tourism development. In addition, the findings confirmed that there is no difference in attitudes towards post-industrial tourism with respect to the dimensions of age, gender, and education.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Harish Gupta ◽  
S. Kiran Kumar Reddy ◽  
Mounika Chiluka ◽  
Vamshikrishna Gandla

AbstractIn this study, we demonstrate the impact of the construction of a mega-dam on the nutrient export regime of a large tropical river into the Arabian Sea. Long-term (11 years) fortnight nutrient parameters, upstream and downstream to Sardar Sarovar (SS) Dam, were examined to determine the periodical change in nutrient fluxes from the Narmada River, India. During this 11-year period, the average discharge of the Narmada River upstream to Rajghat (35.3 km3 year−1) was higher than that of downstream at Garudeshwar (33.9 km3 year−1). However, during the same period, the suspended sediment load was reduced by 21 million tons (MT) from 37.9 MT at Rajghat to 16.7 MT at Garudeshwar. Similarly, mean concentrations of dissolved silica (DSi) reduced from 470 (upstream) to 214 µM (downstream), dissolved inorganic phosphate (DIP) from 0.84 to 0.38 µM, and dissolved inorganic nitrogen (DIN) from 43 to 1.5 µM. It means that about 54%, 55%, and 96% flux of DSi, DIP, and DIN retained behind the dam, respectively. The estimated denitrification rate (80,000 kg N km−2 year−1) for the reservoir is significantly higher than N removal by lentic systems, globally. We hypothesize that processes such as biological uptake and denitrification under anoxic conditions could be a key reason for the significant loss of nutrients, particularly of DIN. Finally, we anticipated that a decline in DIN fluxes (by 1.13 × 109 mol year−1) from the Narmada River to the Arabian Sea might reduce the atmospheric CO2 fixation by 7.46 × 109 mol year−1.


Forests ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (7) ◽  
pp. 855
Author(s):  
Mark W. Brown

The forest industry tends to plan, and model transportation costs based on the potential payload benefits of increased legal gross vehicle weight (GVW) by deploying different configurations, while payload benefits of a configuration can be significantly influenced by the vehicle design tare weight. Through this research the relative benefit of increased legal GVW of different configurations is compared across Australia over a 13-year period from 2006 to 2019, by examining data collected post operation across multiple operations. This approach is intended to offer realistic insight to real operations not influenced by observation and thus reflect long-term operating behaviour. The inclusion of the three most common configuration classes in Australian forestry over a 13-year period has also allowed the exploration of load management between configurations and potential trends over time. When considering the legal GVW and the tare weight impacts across the fleets, the semi-trailer has an 8 t payload disadvantage compared to B-Doubles and 19.6 t disadvantage compared to road trains.


Geosciences ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 330
Author(s):  
Bryan A. Oakley

Napatree Point, an isolated barrier in southern Rhode Island, provides a case study of barrier spit migration via storm driven overwash and washover fan migration. Documented shoreline changes using historical surveys and vertical aerial photographs show that the barrier had little in the way of net change in position between 1883 and 1939, including the impact of the 1938 hurricane. The barrier retreated rapidly between 1945 and 1975, driven by both tropical and extra-tropical storms. The shoreline position has been largely static since 1975. The removal of the foredune during the 1938 hurricane facilitated landward shoreline migration in subsequent lower intensity storms. Dune recovery following the 1962 Ash Wednesday storm has been allowed due to limited overwash and barrier migration over the last several decades. Shoreline change rates during the period from 1945–1975 were more than double the rate of shoreline change between 1939 and 2014 and triple the rate between 1883 and 2014, exceeding the positional uncertainty of these shoreline pairs. The long-term shoreline change rates used to calculate coastal setbacks in Rhode Island likely underestimate the potential for rapid shoreline retreat over shorter time periods, particularly in a cluster of storm activity. While sea-level rise has increased since 1975, the barrier has not migrated, highlighting the importance of storms in barrier migration.


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