A Management Issue for Ecotourism in Taiwan's Forests: To Determine or to Manage the Tourism Carrying Capacity?

摘要

In Taiwan, the idea of ecotourism emerged in the 1980s when Taiwan's national parks began to provide educational tours and interpretation services for visitors. Since then, ecotourism has been a popular term for marketing tourism in national parks, forest stations, natural reserves and rural areas in Taiwan. The "Ecotourism White Paper" for Taiwan was completed by the National Council for Sustainable Development (NCSD) in 2004, in an attempt to provide more environmentally sound guidelines for ecotourism management. One of its key management strategies is to determine a "tourism carrying capacity" for each destination to prevent its environment from degradation. Therefore, it brings up the question of how the manager of an ecotourism destination canproperly determine a carrying-capacity limit that would stand the test. To examine this issue, this paper briefly reviews some applications of tourism carrying capacity for forest recreation management in Taiwan, and then explores the inherent featuresof management problems in ecosystems as well as some strategies to deal with them. Lastly, the implications for the future applications of tourism carrying capacity in Taiwan's forests are discussed, and it ends in the conclusion that tourism carrying capacity should be tackled as a decision-making issue in ecosystem management. That is, tourism carrying capacity is a management action that should be evaluated over time, and it is not a fixed number to be determined.