Study On The Coastal Tourism Carrying Capacity Based On The Environmental Value

Since the mid of last century,the rapid development of natural tourism brought a series of serious challenges to the utilization and conservation of tourism resources.As an essential part of the natural tourism resource,it intensifies the complexity of the contradiction between utilization and conservation on coastal resource because of its public good attributes.Moreover,the problems such as water pollution,loss of species,congestion and the decline on tourists'experience are common phenomena in global tourism areas.And based on the summary of literature review,it illustrates that capacity management becomes into an important tool to solve the contradiction between resource conservation and utilization.However,capacity management is still a problem without any good solutions neither on theoretical support nor practices until now;and without a unified consensus on concept and exact connotation of carrying capacity leads to an inaccurate application in the academic circles.On one hand,the concept of carrying capacity is broad,covering nature,economics,society,consumer preferences and etc.On the other hand,the common management measure is to control the quantity of tourists in the area that is applied by the simple physical and engineered arithmetic to get a static standard of quantity control in practice.According to this,it is urgent to establish more scientific carrying capacity management evaluation standard and system in the coastal tourism areas.The evaluation standard must be based on the resources economics theories reflecting the dynamic changes of interactions between tourists' preference and scenic environment,and this also needs to obtain operability on management.In accordance with the theory of tourism environmental evaluation,this paper is applied the combination of hedonic price method and analysis hierarchical method to calculate environmental evaluations in order to select the essential indicators in the empirical process for establishing the carrying capacity evaluation indicator system and evaluation standard.And then,it is applied the modified fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method to evaluate the coastal tourism carrying capacity.The main content of this paper is as follows:1.According to the systematic review of non-market environment value theories and main methodologies application,it puts forward the carrying capacity evaluation theory based on the coastal tourism environmental attributes evaluation.Conventional evaluation methods of tourism resource carrying capacity are calculating an acceptable quantity of tourists in the coastal tourism park or scenic spot with the average amount of tourism area under the physical and engineered arithmetic.Based on the product attributes demand theory of Lancaster,it presents the carrying capacity evaluation theoretical framework of coastal tourism environmental evaluation combined with main resource attributes in the scenic spots and preferred behaviors of tourists.Under the guidance of this framework,the main research approach of this paper is present Hedonic Price Model to select the environmental attributes and applied AHP to rank the importance of those environmental attributes;furthermore,it utilizes the fuzzy comprehensive evaluation model to estimate the coastal tourism carrying capacity.2.In accordance with Hedonic Price Model,it is analyzed the relationship among environmental attributes,recreation attributes and admission prices in the coastal tourism areas.The estimated results suggest that most nature attributes including the park size,length of beach,beach width,sunshine,air quality,water quality,overall costal environment conditions,marine sightseeing,seashore sightseeing,and mountain,each has a positive and statistically significant effect on the park admission price except for the temperature,number of rainy days,and type of sand.Overall,with those recreation-activity attributes in the scene areas,all those nature attributes can also play a significant role in influencing visitor's willingness to pay to the park admission fees.The most important sea related attribute in terms of both statistical significance and magnitude is the marine sightseeing,with the marginal willingness to pay to be able to increase by 39.80CNY(3.98/0.1 point)as the quality of the marine viewing is improved to one level higher.Additionally,all those weather related characteristics can also play a significant role in influencing visitor's willingness to pay to the park admission fees.In comparison with those nature-based attributes in the park areas,those non-coastal recreation environmental attributes have no influence on the admission price,even some of them have negative influence.Furthermore,both congestion and ranking have significant influence on admission price,and the park congestion results in negative effect on the MWTP(-$0.47)and yet the overall park's ranking exhibits a positive effect($0.05)on the park's MWTP,respectively.3.The traditional analytic hierarchical process present two critical problems:One is the subjectivity of the paired matrix,and the other is an insufficient accuracy regarding the sequential order ranking for the related indicators.To solve these two problems of AHP,this study applies triangle distribution to confirm the pairwise comparisons of AHP matrices,and it also presents the weight ranking of coastal tourism environmental carrying capacity indicator based on the modification of Monte Carlo Simulation in order to correct the lack of traditional AHP.According to the empirical analysis on ranking of the coastal tourism environmental carrying capacity indicators in Dalian,the results reveals this modified method can avoid the subjective judgment bias from questionnaires and experts grading method in order to increase the authenticity and reliability of the evaluation.It is obviously to see the application of Monte Carlo AHP can provide more accurate information on the management of coastal tourism environmental carrying capacity.4.According to the modified weight by Monte Carlo Simulation,it applies fuzzy comprehensive evaluation model on the empirical analysis of Dalian coastal tourism environmental carrying capacity and it measures the main resource indicators threshold.This kind of information provides important theoretical and practical reference on development,improvement and policy advice for those relevant departments.Finally,results illustrates the current situation of Dalian in details,and the ranking is sea-related recreation-activity carrying capacity>weather carrying capacity>other recreation-activity carrying capacity>scene area nature environment carrying capacity>scene area coastal environment carrying capacity>scene are management carrying capacity.