The Theory And Empirical Study Of Tourism Water Footprint Assessment

Nowadays, the conflict between global water supply and demand is becoming more and more serious. Under this backgrounds, the rapidly development of tourism has put huge pressure on tourist destinations, especially on those arid regions. It is important to assess the utilization of tourism water resource before take measures to protect and manage. Water footprint is a quantitative evaluation method of water resources utilization, which developed rapidly in recent years. But it is lack of research on certain industry department, and the water footprint study relate to tourism is even more imperfect. Hence, on the basis of water footprint theory and method and related research, the paper analyzed the basic theory of tourism water footprint systematically. Firstly, described the concept of tourism water footprint. Tourism water footprint is that in a certain area, the water resource consumption of the production process of products and services which are directly consumed by each tourism activities mainly as eating, lodging, transporting, travelling, entertaining, and shopping. Secondly, the paper discussed the connotation and characteristics of tourism water footprint assessment, and analyses the differences and connections between tourism water footprint and water footprint, tourism water ecological footprint as well. Finally, the paper constructed the accounting framework and method of tourism water footprint. Decomposed tourism water footprint into five accounts: transportation water footprint, accommodation water footprint, catering water footprint, sightseeing water footprint and shopping water footprint. Concrete calculation method was account from fresh water, grey water footprint and indirect water footprint. Then the paper chose the tourism water footprint of2013Sanya City to do empirical study. Further analyses the change trends of recent five years'tourism water footprint of Sanya. Results showed that indirect water footprint was the mainly concept of tourism water footprint, while fresh water occupied only9.14%. The biggest contributors to indirect water footprint were commodity water footprint in shopping and food water footprint in catering. And the biggest contributors to fresh water were domestic water in accommodation and irrigation water footprint in sightseeing. The analysis of recent years' trends showed that the tourism water footprint of Sanya was rising a little fast, but in another hand, the utilization efficiency of tourism water resources was improving at the same time. The empirical study shows that the tourism water footprint assessment is more comprehensive than traditional water resources utilization method. And using the down-up method to evaluate tourism water footprint, it could contain the vast majority of tourism water utilization, and the result could reflect the influence of tourism industry structure. At present, the tourism water footprint assessment is still in initial stage. The fundamental research of the water footprint of industrial and agricultural products, the water footprint in different temporal scale, means of traveling and consuming pattern, the water footprint research of major tourism products, and sustainable research of tourism water footprint are still needed further study.