In the fight against climate change, future policy directions in the transition toward a green travel- and tourism-based economy include improving tourism-derived CO2 emission levels and guiding individual low-carbon behavior. In China, people tend to engage in outdoor adventure travel and cultural tourism in natural areas. However, limited information is available on the empirical evaluation of energy use and the CO2 emissions associated with tourism in protected areas. The present study used a life cycle assessment to explore energy use and CO2 emissions due to tourism and identify the factors driving low-carbon behavior. To these ends, survey data for the protected areas of the Qinling Mountains from 2014 to 2019 were used. The results showed that energy use and CO2 emissions in various tourism sectors steadily increased from 2014 to 2019, primarily because of an increase in transportation activity. This study used data derived from the calculation of CO2 emissions per tourist per trip to identify the various factors jointly contributing to the low-carbon behavior of tourists. These included a low-carbon attitude, low-carbon knowledge, environmental education, and policy reward. The broader implications of this study are that several emission reduction policy options are available to address the challenges inherent in sustainable tourism development and that these policies may be selected according to specific conditions. The low-carbon transformation of recreational facilities at travel destinations, policy rewards, and environmental education can regulate tourist behavior, holding the key to sustainable tourism development in protected areas.
24 February 2022 in Environmental Science and Pollution Research
The interplay of multi-reservoirs is critical in reservoir joint disposal and water conservancy projects. As the flood risk of upstream hydrological stations could be transferred and unevenly distributed to downstream tributary stations, flood risk transfer through multi-reservoirs warrants further investigation. This study proposed a copula simulation approach to develop a joint flood risk distribution of multi-reservoirs (spanning Xianyang, Huaxian County, and Zhangjiashan) in a drainage tributary of the Weihe River. Pair-copulas of each reservoir pair were constructed to analyse the correlations between the reservoir sites. The approach was then used to create a joint flood risk distribution for the reservoirs. The flood risk and corresponding flood volume of Zhangjiashan were calculated based on the flood risk levels of Xianyang and Huaxian County. The results indicate that the flood risks of Huaxian County would be transferred to Xianyang and Zhangjiashan to some extent, and Xianyang could mitigate more flood risks from Huaxian County than from Zhangjiashan. The findings have significance for informed decision-making regarding the Zhangjiashan reservoir construction project.
Basin water pollution caused by livestock, poultry and fish breeding is still a serious problem for remote villages, however, reliable regional breeding management programming have the potentials to improve pollution status. This paper focuses on the optimal model design and water quality analysis of the livestock, poultry and fish breeding system for Wenchang City, China. Methods of multi-objective programming (MOP), interval parameter programming (IPP), fuzzy-stochastic parameter programming (FSPP), and chance constrained programming (CCP) were incorporated into the developed model to tackle multi uncertainties described by interval values, probability distributions, fuzzy membership function. Based on the estimation of local breeding potential and current situation of surface water section, a multi-objective mixed fuzzy-stochastic nonlinear programming optimization model is presented with one-dimensional water quality model. In order to evaluate the environmental carrying capacity of livestock, poultry and fishery manure, predict its development trend and investigate the implementation effect of different emission reduction policies, this paper designs quantization system of the urban water environmental carrying capacity for the model. The results indicated that the water environment pollutant absorption capacity and carrying capacity of Wenchang city have approached the limit especially the towns in the northeast of City which limited the overall development space of the City. The modeling results are valuable for supporting the adjustment of the existing livestock, poultry and fish breeding schemes within a complicated system benefit and surface water quality situation under uncertainty.