Ecological Footprint Analysis of the Tourism in Rural Areas (Case study: Veshnaveh Village -Qom County)

Tourism industry is known as one of the most thriving, attractive, job- creating and greatest industries in third millennium. The growth of this industry, despite its many positive economic advantages for hosting communities, has had some adverse consequences particularly on environmental aspects that have led to increased concerns among the experts and planners. As a consequent, various methods have been presented since the 1980s which aim to evaluate human activities on the environment. Ecological footprint analysis (EFA) is one of those important methods used for one decade in different fields. Hence, the purpose of the present research is to evaluate tourists’ activities on natural environment using ecological footprint index.
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK: The concept of ecological footprint was first proposed in 1996 by Reese and Wackernage in British Colombia University. This idea refers to the value of productive land required for meeting consumption needs of population and absorption of all their wastes. In fact, the results of the application of ecological footprint analysis indicate where human beings impose pressure on natural resources. Methods used based on the framework of ecological footprint include combined (deductive) and inductive calculations. Combined method is based on national consumption data; hence, it is suitable for national ecological footprint calculations. In inductive method, consumption categorization is performed based on components division and it is mainly applied in regional analyses. This method is known as a concentrated (top – down) approach meaning that at first the value of performed activity is determined based on the population and then these energies are converted to the main land use; afterwards, they are converted to the universal area unit in order to provide comparison with other sectors, organizations, and regions.
Generally, inductive approach provides a more perfect picture of conflicts related to material production and it shows significant relationship between primary productions (agricultural and mineral production) and secondary productions (industrial production).
The present study is an applied research and the methodology used for this purpose is descriptive- analytic. Statistical population of this study includes all tourists visited Veshnaveh village during 2012. According to statistics presented by village council and also touristic complexes, the number of tourists was estimated to be 100,000. Therefore, the size of sample (about 350 individuals) was calculated using Cochran formula. The method of footprint calculation is deductive (combined) including following stages: 1- Estimation of per capita consumption of main materials based on total data of the region under study and dividing the total value by the number of population;
2- Estimation of the land assigned to each individual for production of each item consumed through dividing the average annual consumption of each item on the average annual production or land yield.
3- Calculation of average of total ecological footprint for each individual through summing up all ecosystem regions assigned to each individual.
4- Calculation of ecological footprint for the population of each under planning region (N) is obtained through the average product of ecological footprint of each individual in population size (N x EF = Fp).
5- The data used for estimation of the land size required for providing each one include food, transportation, rubbish, water, electricity, and oil.
It must be noted that the main components investigated include electricity, water, transportation, food, and rubbish.
DISCUSSION & Many studies have been conducted concerning ecological footprint in urban and rural studies field; however, the present study is distinguished from prior studies in that it investigates the effects of tourism activities on the environment and that the selected model enables us to evaluate from local scale to global scale.
In this study, the effects of tourists’ activities on such sectors as transportation, rubbish, electricity, water, and food were investigated in Veshnaveh village. The results indicate that the rate of ecological footprint of tourism in this village is equal to 10751762 hectares that is 180 times more than the area of this village (60 hectare).
This situation compared to the environmental capacity of village that is 657 global hectares indicates high rate. These figures are calculated according to the standards presented by global footprint network (GFN) in 2008 by which the environmental capacity of each individual was calculated as 1.08 hectare.
The practical solutions concerning the modification of consumption pattern are the development of public transportation for village visitors, public training concerning consumption methods and observing environmental health, gas delivery to the villages instead of oil and gasoline that are more pollutant than natural gas.