Invisible Cities
Conclusion on air quality
Download 352.16 Kb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- 2.7 Geographical comparisons between tourism and air pollution
- Chapter 3 Factors Influencing International Tourism Demand
2.6 Conclusion on air qualityIn the previous two sections, we have reviewed literatures about air quality and air pollution in China. The current situation of air quality in Chinese cities is not pleasant. The healthy standard of WHO cannot be satisfied in many cities, and actually the air quality is far below, since the concentration of PM 2.5 is much more higher than the standard requirement. The comparison in the international level also presented that the air in Chinese cities are more contaminated than the others. Furthermore, there is also a spatial distribution of air pollutants, showing that the northern China has suffered more than the south, and the most severe pollution are in Hebei and Shandong Peninsula. Tracking the composition of PM 2.5, it can be concluded that natural and anthropogenic reasons together caused the air pollution, and the latter plays a more important role than the former. Likewise, natural causes are easier to trace than the other, since it only related to temperature, humidity and wind force. Anthropogenic causes are related to combustion. Transportation, construction and iron/steel smelting are all responsible. Furthermore, the attribute of air quality as a public good reflected the shortage of legislative forces of government. In the end, the projects carried out for the Olympic 2008 lost its effects after the event, thus more sustainable solutions are needed for mitigating air pollution. 2.7 Geographical comparisons between tourism and air pollutionPutting the map of air pollution on top of the map of international tourism, some interesting overlaps are discovered. In general, both international tourism and air pollution have a trend that eastern China inclines to gain more attention than the west, because the inequality of economic development. However, when look into the details, there are still some differences in geographical distribution cause by various reasons. The overlap of tourism and pollution falls in the surrounding regions of Beijing. Several reasons can explain this phenomenon. First, Circum-Bohai Sea Region, representatively, the city of Beijing is both economic and cultural center of China, which has rich reserves of tourist attractiveness and business potentials, increases tourists’ willingness to visit. Second, as one of the economic centers in China, thus a large proportion of manufacture industries, including a heavily polluted one – Capital Steel Company, is located in this region, together with intensive transport activities, composed the basis of pollution. Third, the geographical location requires heating in the winter, and topography that the shelter of Taihang Mountain locked the pollutants in this region. Subsequently, the distribution of extreme points differs from each other’s, most polluted regions are Hebei and Shandong Province, covered in the Circum-Bohai Sea Region, while the other two most favorable destinations of international tourists are Yangtze River Delta (YRD) and Pearl River Delta (PRD). While YRD and PRD are also economic centers, intensive production is still the source of generating the air pollutants, which is a fair-play with Circum-Bohai Sea. Therefore, the natural characteristics might be the major reasons of less pollution in YRD and PRD. One reason is still related to heating, that there is an absence of heating system in the southern China, which YRD and PRD are both included. The second reason might be the topography, that monsoon blowing in YRD and PRD diluted the pollutants more easily. Additionally, tourism industry in Hebei and Shandong are relatively under developed, while YRD and PRD already have some integrated strategies of tourism development, especially for mega events tourism in YRD. In conclusion, albeit the development of tourism industry is going on and the number of inbound international tourists keeps increasing, the serious air pollution currently is truly undermining the potential of growth since it might damage the image of a destination. In the next chapter, an overview of a series cases will be presented, in order to elaborate more deeply and give an expectation that how the influence of the unfavorable factor, similar to the characteristics of air pollution, in the touristic destinations will be imposed on the tourism demand. Chapter 3 Factors Influencing International Tourism Demand3.1 IntroductionThe last chapter illustrated that the international tourism had experienced an expansion in China in the past decades, and government is also willing to keep the pace of growth, since they started to promote event tourism recently. Regarding the air pollution problem, which government has been trying to mitigate, although there are few researches done about its impact on tourism, it can be seen as one of the negative, or quasi-negative factors influencing tourism. Air pollution is a kind of change of environment in the destination due to anthropogenic reasons. Likewise, a downward change of environment caused by nature also leads to a negative impact on tourism, and sometimes such an incident will trigger a chain reaction. For example, the drought in the southern Spain, caused a water supply crisis in Benidorm because of the lack of infrastructure, resulted in a reduction of tourism revenue in 1978, and undermined its reputation as a holiday destination (Martinez-Ibarra, 2013). Once it happened, the media will very likely exaggerate it, and public would incline to put a negative tag on this destination, because image in the media affects people’s decisions, and tourism is one of them (Avraham, 2000; Murphy & Bayley, 1989). Certainly, there have been following actions conducted to solve the water crisis, but the image of the city have already been damaged through the communication of media in public, which makes tourists to perceive risk in that destination (Lepp & Gibson, 2003). No matter what reasons behind the cases, in general, such an incident will trap a destination into a negative image, which changes behavioral intentions and satisfaction, leading to a reduction in tourism demand is the consequence (Chen & Tsai, 2007). Satisfaction also links to tourists’ loyalty to a destination, so the image might have continuous impact on tourism demand (Yoon & Uysal, 2005). Meanwhile, tourism demand backward influences destination image. Tourism demand is higher in more popular destinations, which facilitates growth of tourism industry, and a better-developed tourism industry will improve destination image. This chain reaction is shown in Figure 5. Figure 5: Chain reaction of negative incidents Negative Incident Media Publicity Destination Image Tourism Demand Source: own elaboration Note that media publicity itself influences destination image directly, but in this chain reaction, it is put in a different shape because media publicity has a moderating function. Successful public relation in the media publicity might reduce negative impacts the incident brought, while a poor strategy of public relation may enlarge the negative impacts on destination image. Supposing this can also be true for our case – the poor air quality in Chinese cities, it is reasonable to focus on the similar cases that have experienced a decline in their tourism industry because of certain (negative) incidences. Meanwhile, in order to get a comprehensive analysis of the tourism demand in Chinese cities, besides of incident itself and media publicity, the other factors also have to be taken into account. For example, destination attractiveness is an important factor influencing tourism demand, and it is complicated to measure. Therefore, this chapter will also go in depth of those factors and identify their impacts respectively. It aims to help the hypothesis formulation based on the expectation gained from the results of the cases, and some of the factors will be adapted to quantitative model for our case in the next chapter. The rest of this chapter will be arranged as follows: In Section 3.2, factors influencing tourism demand will be identified, and the third sub-question, which is factors influencing destination attractiveness will be answered since they share some common factors. Section 3.3 will elaborate another critical variable in the chain reaction – media publicity and its impact on tourism. Then, a typology will be set up in Section 3.4, in order to select cases relevant and similar to this research, and such type of cases will be focused in the following sections. Three cases will be studied in Section 3.5, in order to give empirical support that how negative incidents have resulted in tourism demand in the reality. The lessons learnt from precedents will give an expectation to the case of Chinese cities, thus a hypothesis of the main research question will be formulated in Section 3.6. Directory: pub pub -> Project Scoring Template Pre-Construction Phase New Core/Branch Campus Projects pub -> Acm word Template for sig site pub -> The german unification, 1815-1870 pub -> Baltic Olympiads in Informatics: Challenges for Training Together pub -> Preparation of Papers for ieee transactions on medical imaging pub -> Forthcoming meetings and conferences pub -> Asilomar Conference on Circuits, Systems & Computers, Pacific Grove, ca, November 1978, pp. 55 58 pub -> Forthcoming meetings and conferences pub -> Harmonised compatibility and sharing conditions for video pmse in the 7 9 ghz frequency band, taking into account radar use Download 352.16 Kb. Share with your friends:
|