Ecotourists appreciate nature and are willing to learn about nature and ecology. Th erefore ecotourism is often seen as a product package that supports sustainable tourism development. Th is study contributes to existing research in the fi eld of ecotourism as it investigates how travel motives and environmental concern of mountain tourists infl uences their actual demand for ecotourism. A surv...

Is ecotourism merely a novel ‘saleable’ label for what travelers and their agents have been doing all along? Or is it “a new alternative for sharing cultures and ecosystems based on. . noble objectives” [18]? As an arena in which “corporate tenets and conservationist ideals are interwoven’ [47], ecotourism may continue to elude concrete definition. However, analysis of the benefits and costs of...

With the critique of ‘fortress conservation’, ecotourism has become an important element of biodiversity conservation (Butcher 2007: 22ff, Chatty/Colchester 2002): local people are no longer driven out of nature reserves, they are included in conservation efforts instead. Ecotourism has been developed in the context of such conservation efforts. Promising to reconcile ‘man’ and ‘nature’, ecotou...

Ecotourism presents a small segment of nature-tourism, which is understood as travelling to relatively undisturbed or uncontaminated natural areas (Gőssling, 1999). According to the World Wildlife Fund, in 1995 nature-tourism consisted of 15% of all tourism worldwide. The term ecotourism can be well described with the following five criteria: nature conservation, low impact, sustainability, mea...

The increasing demand for sustainable development will have a profound impact on all types of urban infrastructures. However, there is a lack of knowledge of how sustainable development should be attained and how sustainability of various technical systems should be assessed. This paper describes the framework of a systems analysis project dealing with the above issues, which focuses on urban w...

Ecotourism is a sub-component of the field of sustainable tourism. Ecotourism’s perceived potential as an effective tool for sustainable development is the main reason why developing countries are now embracing it and including it in their economic development and conservation strategies. Ecotourism, as an alternative tourism, involves visiting natural areas in order to learn, to study, or to c...

Ecological and environmental protection is the core content of ecotourism development. A quantitative evaluation of the effects of ecotourism environmental protection (hereinafter referred to as EEP) measures on protected areas is conducive to a deeper understanding of the key issues related to ecotourism development in China, thus providing the theoretical basis for formulating the relevant na...