Progress on Tourism Eco-Efficiency and its Implications

Tourism destination is a special area typical of the man-land relationship interaction. Eco-efficiency evaluation of tourism destination is a basis for developing inclusive and sustainable development policies and measures for tourism destination. This paper discusses the progress on tourism eco-efficiency from three angles-concept definition, measure methods and empirical study. Three aspects of deficiency were shown in the present study. One is the research perspective. Most researches on tourism eco-efficiency are from the level that human material production behaviors influence environment, however researches from the level that human consumption behaviors influence environment are inadequate. The other is the research content. The researches mainly focus on the value and impact two aspects, while the measure concerning value and impact is incomplete. The last part is research method. Though, currently some scholars have already applied ecological footprint analysis method, material flow analysis, ecosystem health assessment to the evaluation of regional eco-efficiency research. The methods about the measure of eco-efficiency which include priority structure method, multi-objective programming method, ecological topological method, data envelopment analysis, ecological cost value index are suffering highly controversial, owing to having inherent defects on characterizing natural resource consumption, environmental pollution, ecological service value, non-polluting ecological impacts, human development and so on. Consequently, from the view of input, output and process of logistics, energy flow, currency flow of tourism destinations natural-economic-social-tourism complex system, making eco-efficiency as an entry point, aiming at achieving sustainable development of tourism destination, studying on tourism eco-efficiency, it will be the frontier research area of Tourism Geography.