An Emergy Analysis On The Tourism Ecosystem Of Jiuzhaigou Nature Reserve

In recent years, the rapidly developing tourism has become one of the most important sector to promote regional social economy and provide employment opportunities. Nature reserve is the important material carrier for tourism development by its excellent ecological environment. With development of tourism, there is a contradiction between development and ecological environment in nature deserve. Most of nature reserves in our country have developed tourism activities, environmental damage, ecological degradation, community interests imbalance and other problems have occurred. Evaluation of sustainable development of nature reserve has become the important field in tourism geography research.Nature reserve is a special district, researchers pay more attention to preserve sustainable development in nature reserve. This paper tries to use emergy method to resolve some key problems:(1)Can tourism economy be the dominant model for sustainable development in nature reserve,(2)Using emergy method to measure the environmental impact of tourism economy,(3)to evaluate the sustainable development level of nature reserve.Using emergy theory and method, this paper has constructed basic framework and index system in emergy analysis of nature reserve system, quantitatively analyzed structure, function, economic efficiency, ecological efficiency and sustainable development of nature reserve, it provides the theoretical basis for evaluation of ecological value, environmental impact, tourism activities and sustainable development level of nature reserve. At the same time, this paper takes Jiuzhaigou nature reserve for example, using the emergy theory estimates the sustainable development level of Jiuzhaigou Nature Reserve under rapidly growth of tourists within the last30years. The study shows:(1)Tourism economy is the dominant economic form in Jiuzhaigou nature reserve. The greatest part of emergy input is tourism input from human society, the renewable input is too low, the system is redundantly dependent on outside resources. In2010year, total use emergy is4.17×1020sej of Jiuzhaigou Nature Reserve, in which, renewable resources emergy is7.15×1019sej, resident livelihood emergy is2.26×1018sej, tourism investment emergy is3.43×1020sej, about82.30%of total use emergy.(2)There is much more positive impact than negative one produced by tourism development in Jiuzhaigou nature reserve. This paper measures the positive and negative impact including tourism output, ecosystem services output and waste output of tourism development using emergy theory, provides the reference for the evaluation of tourism impact. In2010year, tourism output emergy is4.08×1020sej, ecosystem output emergy is7.21×1022sej, waste output emergy is2.06×1019sej.(3)The sustainable developing level of Jiuzhaigou Nature Reserve is moderate. Emergy sustainable index is0.24, emergy index for sustainable development is0.29. Tourism development of Jiuzhaigou nature reserve relies too much on the outside nonrenewable resource. High environment load ratio and waste output ratio become main restraining factors for sustainable development of Jiuzhaigou nature reserve. To improve the running state of the system and the sustainable development level, Jiuzhaigou should enhance local renewable resource input, enhance energy efficiency and increase energy output ratio.