Indicator System And Methodology Study For Tourism Impact On Biodiversity In Plan Environmental Assessment

The ultimate aim of Strategic Environmental Assessement (SEA) is to help protect the environment and promote sustainable development. SEA promotes sustainability via integration considerations of cumulative, indirect, synergistic environmental effects into strategic decision-making. Biodiversity is an important part of natural environment. As an environmental protection tool, SEA could promote the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity. But Biodiversity Impact Assessment (BIA) in SEA is still far from meeting its goals and is unsuccessful in identifying significance of impact, uncertainty and alternative selection. In order to promote the practice of BIA in SEA, this dissertation discussed establishment of indicator system and methodology of tourism plan impact on biodiversity.According to the requirements of BIA and tourism impact attributes on biodiversity, indicator system was established for landscape, ecosystem and species level of biodiversity by expert consultation. Based on the analysis of human impact characteristics on biodiversity, impact assessment methodologies were developed qualitatively and quantificationally. The feasibility of indicator system and methodologies were tested by two tourism plan cases.The following were the main results:1. Indacator system was established for landscape, ecosystem and species level of biodiversity. There were two impact assessment indicators for landscape (area changes of landscape type and changes of landscape structure), two for ecosystem (area changes of ecosystem type and changes of ecosystem attribute), and three for species (objectives, affected population size and impact intensity). The indicator system was created to fit the requirements of SEA and reflect tourism impact trend on biodiversity.2. Human impact on biodiversity led to biodiversity loss in targeted area, i.e. biodiversity carrying capacity (BCC) of the area declined. Decline extent of BCC is relevant to human impact intensity and both of them are successive. The successive changes of BCC could be graded artificially according to degrees. In other words, due to human impact on biodiversity, BCC in targeted area declined from upper to lower gradient. According to this law, ecosystem was given score by conservation value. The most ideal ecosystem score was one, and the scores of other ecosystem were all less than one since they were evaluated by their significance in contrast to the most ideal ecosystem. Classifacation of landscape type was based on ecosystem value, and the same landscape type was the collection of ecosystem of the same value. In a given task, the number of ecosystem value gradients equaled to the number of landscape types.3. Establishment of impact assessment methodology of landscape and ecosystem was based on the above hypothesis. BCC of landscape was the product of landscape area and value scoring. The loss of BCC of landscape could evaluate impact significance of landscape, and so was ecosystem impact assessment. Due to integrated considerations of ecosystem frangibility, representativeness and endemicity in value scoring, attribute indicator assessment of ecosystem was reflected in the process of ecosystem impact assessement, while impact assessment of landscape structure mainly conformed to the law of island biogeography.4. In practice, it was impossible to obtain the detailed information of all species in a targeted area of BIA, so the species-level impact assessment should be addressed through the studies on the key objectives like the species which were protected and closed related to people or species of economic and cultural values, etc. Significance of species impact was decided by affecting population size and impact intensity. Population size was estimated by distribution area. Impact intensity of species was classified into four ranks according to the changes of viability and propagation ability of affected species.5. The indicator system and methodology were practised in Xishuangbanna national natural reserve tourism plan and Pudaso national park tourism plan. The results of the cases could reflect the impact trend on biodiversity. The methodologies were flexible and could adapt to different contents of tourism plan and biodiversity baselines.