Study On The Resilience Of Tourism Socio-ecological System

Resilience is the ability of the system to withstand disturbance and maintain its function and control ability.It is also the theoretical core of the socio-ecological system conceptual framework.In 2002,the World Summit on Sustainable Development held in Sweden.The meeting proposes that resilience be the common responsibility of all mankind,and the resilience concept be added to Agenda 21 as the supplementary material.Resilience thought and method are applied to the socio-ecological system.It is a new perspective on global sustainable development research.Sustainable tourism is an important part of the global sustainable development.Tourism destination is one of important socio-ecological system types.With the goal of socio-ecological sustainability,the tourism development makes the resilience become a central element.From the perspective of resilience,the complexity,dynamic and comprehensiveness of the tourism destination become an important way to study the tourism sustainable development.The study chooses the Qiandao Lake as a typical case,and takes tourism socio-ecological system as the research object.The guideline of the research is ‘the adaptive cycle process,object resilience(regional resilience)diachronic measurement,subject resilience(community resilience)cognitive measurement,adaptive management' of the tourism socio-ecological system.The systematic research is carried out on the above four aspects.This dissertation has three sections and is organized as follows:Section 1,from chapter 1 to 2,is literature review and relevant theory analysis.In this part,the background and significance of this research are presented,and the thought and methodology of this study are put forward.The relevant literatures of research at home and abroad on the resilience of tourism socio-ecological system are systematically reviewed.Then the concepts on the resilience,adaptive cycle,life cycle theory and sustainability are discriminated.Section 2,including chapter 3 to 7,is the major part of this dissertation.The content of five aspects were discussed.Chapter 3,starting from the theoretical research,sets out to clarify the definition,characteristics,types and elements of tourism socio-ecological system.The conceptual research framework of tourism socio-ecological system is built.The resilience connotation,type,measurement and evaluation of tourism socio-ecological system are put forward.The study finds that tourism is the main driving force of the tourism socio-ecological system.From the vulnerability and response capability interaction perspective,the resilience of socio-ecological system is measured,including regional entities and community cognition.Chapter 4,taking the Qiandao Lake as a case,adopts the adaptive cycle theory to comprehensively analyze the historical evolution process,reveal the characteristics and the main elements,and determine its adaptive cycle process and driving factors from the social,economic and ecological systems.The results indicate that lake,tourism,community are the three key factors of the tourism socio-ecological system in the Qiandao Lake.The Qiandao Lake has gone through the adaptive cycle process from the traditional agriculture economy to the forest tea economy,and then to the tourism economy.The Xin Anjiang reservoir construction and tourism development are the main disturbance variable during the adaptive cycle process.Since 1982,the evolutionary process of the tourism socio-ecological system in the Qiandao Lake has included the initial development,integration development,protection development,the protection and development equilibrium stage.The system is mainly affected not only by external influence of the macro-regional development and market demand,but also by the internal influence of the economic development and resource constraints.Chapter 5,starting from the regional entities,builds resilience evaluation system with the socio-ecological system resilience indicators of tourist destination,including the fragility,response capacity in social,economic and ecological subsystems.By adopting the set pair analysis,the study empirically measures the socio-ecological system resilience,identifies the main factors impacting resilience,and illustrates the mechanism that influences the tourism socio-ecological system in Qiandao Lake.The dissertation also introduces curve distribution patterns in Qiandao Lake.The results are as follows:(1)During the period from 1987 to 2012,the socio-ecological system fragility index in the Qiandao Lake slowly increased,the index of adaptive capacity rose rapidly,and the resilience index rose steadily.The resilience should be the result of the interaction between fragility and response capability.The total fragility is mostly affected by the ecological subsystem,whereas the total response capacity,by the economic subsystem.The social and economic subsystems,however,directly affect the total resilience.As a matter of fact,the total response capacity plays a decisive role in resilience,in which response capacity of social and economic subsystems are more significant,although the system itself also has certain resistance and resilience.(2)In the tourism socio-ecological system,the relationship between the impact factors and the resilience roughly falls into six curve types.On the one hand,there are two types of linear relationships between the resilience and ecological background conditions,social stability,industrial livelihood and ecological control measures.The one is in the trend of progressive increase and the other,of progressive decrease.On the other hand,U-shaped curves or inverted U-shaped curves,are mainly related to fragility indexes and response capacity indexes brought about by tourism development.In terms of impact direction,rates and ways,the influence curve of resilience factors can be divided into four types,namely U-shaped increasing curve,U-shaped decreasing curve,inverted U-shaped curve which increases fast at first and then decreases slowly,and inverted U-shaped curve which increases slowly at first and then decreases fast.In conclusion,nonlinear effects still dominate.There are differences and uncertainty in the direction and rate of the factors.The results,in fact,further confirm nonlinear thought of resilience and the applicability of the set pair analysis method.Chapter 6,starting from the community cognition,designs the questionnaire including social,economic,ecological and governance items respectively.The community vulnerability,response capability and resilience cognition are measured by applying the factor analysis and path analysis with assistance of SPSS and DPS software.The driving mechanism of the community resilience cognition is revealed.The results are as follows:(1)Residents' community vulnerability cognition in the Qiandao Lake are more strong,and have obvious different tendency.In individual response capability,residents' cognition level is in the medium,but has high identification degree in governmental response capability.In total,the average value of the community resilience cognition is 2.42,in the mediocre level.(2)The key influencing factors of community resilience cognition can be divided into demographic characteristics,vulnerability,response capability(including individual and governmental response capability).There are the most significant differences between different education and different occupation level in community resilience cognition.The total community resilience cognition are affected by ecological degradation factors,individual social,economic,ecological response capability factors,and governmental social,economic,ecological response capability factors.(3)There exist different intensities among the independent variables influencing resilience on the single and compound effects.Among them,governmental response capability has the strongest direct effect.Also,individual response capability and vulnerability have the stronger effect,and the coexistence of direct effect and indirect effect.Chapter 7,according to the quantitative results of resilience measurement and running track of tourism socio-ecological system,analyzes sustainable development status and co-management elements of the tourism socio-ecological system,and puts forward the development orientation and the adaptive management countermeasures in Qiandao Lake.The results are as follows:(1)The tourism development is now exogenous in Qiandao Lake,which is not sustainable.The lifestyle experience should be the direction of the tourism development.(2)The government is currently the main governance entity.This means that government should improve its decision-making capacity,increase the resources-sharing opportunity,urge residents' income and expenditure balance,insist on the natural ecology protection,and gradually develop the education on local culture at school,promote the adaptive co-management,and improve the community resilience.Section 3,chapter 8,is the conclusion,which summarizes the main results of the research,discusses some problems in the study,and put forward the further research.