Evaluating Forest Visitors’ Place Attachment, Recreational Activities, and Travel Intentions under Different Climate Scenarios

Abstract

Climate change leads to a variety of extreme weather conditions such as heat waves, unusual cold weather, and heavy rain, which always ends up with serious disasters. It could have a tremendous impact on a lot of industries in the world. The tourist industry, that plays a vital role in the global economy, has faced serious impacts from climate change in many tourist attractions, e.g., national parks, mountain areas, and beaches. The travel behavior of visitors has been changed under various climate change conditions. To understand the influence degrees of tourists on climate change factors, this study aimed to analyze whether there is difference in the influence of climate change on socio-demographic background, travel activities, travel intention, and the revisit intention attitude of tourists with different degrees of place attachment to Wuling National Forest Recreation Area. This study further investigated whether the climate change adaptation strategies offered by the park manager would have a positive influence on travel intention of tourists. The results of this study showed that except for heat waves, events related to climate change such as stronger typhoon, heavy rain, unusual cold weather condition, mud sliding, forest fire, and the appearance of mosquitos would have a negative influence on travel intention, especially for the tourists with a low degree of place attachment. In addition, if the park manager offers strategies to adapt to climate change conditions, these strategies would have a positive influence on travel intention.

Demand for forest ecosystem services: a comparison study in selected areas in the Czech Republic and China

“…The other two groups are likely to differ in the way the forest is used. Tourists are perhaps more pro-cultural forest services than urban dwellers (Liu et al 2021 ). Contrarily, ecosystem services in the urban green space are critical for urban inhabitation sustainability, thus it is important to know the demand for ecosystem services for future planning of urban green infrastructure (Wolch et al 2014 ).…”

Factors Influencing Users’ Perceived Restoration While Using Treetop Trails: The Case of the Fu and Jinjishan Forest Trails, Fuzhou, China

“…It reflects individuals’ attitudes, thoughts, values, beliefs, meanings, and behavioural tendencies regarding the environment [ 41 ]. Place attachment is affected by age, location, and climate [ 42 , 43 , 44 ], as well as environmental quality [ 42 ]. Although few studies explored the associations between greenway quality and place attachment, similar studies conducted in green space revealed that environments with better quality result in a stronger place attachment [ 9 ].…”

Civil society’s perception of forest ecosystem services. A case study in the Western Alps

“…Mountain and forest ecosystems play a key role, recognised both at the EU level with the new EU Forest Strategy 2030 (Aggestam and Giurca, 2021) -a flagship initiative of the European Green Deal -and internationally with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (Goal 15) (Marín et al, 2021;Rimal et al, 2021). This recognition can be attributed to the services offered, among which, the provision of drinking water (Piaggio and Siikamäki, 2021), CO2 storage (Blanc et al, 2019), protection against natural hazards (Scheidl et al, 2020), mental and physical wellbeing, and recreational tourism activities (Liu et al, 2021) are growing in importance.…”