The Impact of Sustainable Tourism and Good Governance on Biodiversity Loss in Malaysia

Abstract

Abstract. The importance of forest in providing the natural habitat for plants and animals; storing hundreds of billions of tons of carbon; buffering against flood and drought; stabilizing soils, influencing climate change and providing food and home for the indigenous people has led the international community to protect them from further destruction in the future. In addition, the sustainable tourism is a key source of income and employment for local communities, which, in turn, provide strong incentives to protect biodiversity. For such reasons, and given the capacity limits of environmental resources coupled with the quantitative growth of tourism, there is an urgent need for the development of tourism to take biodiversity seriously. In this study we investigate the impact of sustainable tourism and good governance indicators on biodiversity loss in Malaysia for the period 1996 to 2012. In this study we employed the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS), Dynamic OLS (DOLS) and Fully-Modified OLS (FMOLS) which is efficient in small sample to estimate the long-run model of biodiversity loss (proxy by deforestation rates). Interestingly, our results found that good governance and sustainable tourism do contribute in mitigating biodiversity loss in Malaysia.

Does Tourism Lead to Environmental Impact? Cross-National Static and Dynamic Evidence from the Ecological Footprint

“…Tourism is measured by the number of international tourist arrivals. In comparison with other tourism measurements, such as tourism receipts, travels durations, length of stay, the number of tourist arrivals are a better indicator of the volume of tourism and is widely adopted in the tourism context (Din et al 2014;Habibullah et al 2016& Habibullah et al 2018). Additionally, this study uses the World Bank's Worldwide Governance Indicators developed by Kaufman et al (2008) that captures a broad governance dimension covering six elements, as shown in Table 2.…”

“…The negative estimated coefficient for governance indicator shows that a 1% increase in the regulatory quality seems to thwart the ecological footprint by 0.28%. Therefore, good governance can formulate and implement sound policies and regulations that promote environmental protection, and this is how environmental conservation takes place (Din et al, 2014;Habibullah et al, 2018).…”

“…Extensive research has been conducted to examine the impact of tourism on the environment. Several environmental indicators, such as CO 2 / greenhouse gas (GHG) emission (Narayan & Narayan, 2010;Zafar et al 2019), threatened species (Din et al, 2014;Habibullah et al, 2016;Habibullah et al, 2018), deforestation (Habibullah et al, 2019;Ahmed et al, 2015;Arshad et al, 2020), water and air pollution (Gedik & Mugan-Ertugral, 2019;Saenz-de-Miera & Rosselló, 2014), land degradation (Garcia & Servera, 2003;Bajocco et al, 2012), species richness (Laiolo & Rolando, 2005;Huhta & Sulkava, 2014), carrying capacity (Armono et al, 2017) as well as trampling effect (Lynn & Brown, 2003;Pinn & Rodgers, 2005;Rossi et al, 2006) have been used to illustrate this relationship. Ozturk et al (2016) and Uzar (2021) state that it is important to utilise a detailed assessment in quantifying environmental impact.…”

Capacidad de carga turística en el Parque Nacional Islas Marietas, Nayarit, México

“…Por otra parte, es importante contemplar que dentro de las alternativas que se pueden tomar para asegurar la completa funcionalidad de la conservación de la biodiversidad se deben incluir medidas de protección legal, planes de gestión, tiempo y esfuerzo (Santamarta, 2014). Un elemento clave en el éxito potencial de las políticas de un país depende de la calidad del gobierno o de la práctica de un buen gobierno (Din, Habibullah & Choo, 2014).…”