Abstract:

The Sushansi National Forest Park, located in northern Wuhan City of the Yangtze River Basin, is considered as the most famous forest park in this biggest city of central China. The park is a stateowned forest farm, supporting a wildlife reserve, and also a species library. Since tourism has affected local ecological environment in recent years, more information about how tourists should take care of environmental protection is needed. In this work, the tourists willingness to pay (WTP) values of ecocompensation in Sushansi National Forest Park was analyzed, based on contingent valuation method (CVM), and through a questionnaire survey. After qualitative interviews and pilot investigation, we validated size scale and questionnaire, and then investigated tourist from August 25th to October 5th in 2012. Including some impact factors, payment card choice question format of CVM was developed, and 454 effective responses in total have been received. The original data were put into Excel, qualified and then analyzed by some basic statistical indexes of frequency, ratio, mean value and standard deviation. The results indicated that all respondents support environment protection, and 573% of them thought that giving the fund WTP was necessary for ecocompensation, especially for the tourists from 31 to 50 years old. And major tourists (more than 80%) agreed that, refuse treatment, water protection, and capacity development would cause great detriment to environment of tourism in the Sushansi National Forest Park. And they expressed their hope that the WTP fund should be used first for water protection, plant & soil recovery, wildlife conservation, as well as the propaganda of environmental protection. From the questionnaire, almost half of the WTP respondents would like to pay 5 RMB as the largest WTP bid, followed by 1, 10, and 15 RMB. The higher the patients cultural level was, the more income was obtained, tourist preferred to pay more for the ecocompensation. Tourist proposed that, the raising of fund might be lead by government allocation, paying taxes or extracting from ticket proceeds, more than cash donation. Based on the described information, we found the significant factors influencing the results of the payment card were age, profession, education, monthly income and travel times. Further, the correlation analyses results revealed that relationships between the bid of WTP per time and variables as age, education, monthly income and travel times were positive, but negative relationships were found between the bid and gender, profession, etc. By using mean value method to calculate, the per capita WTP of tourist was 44-78 RMB per capita per time, with the mean value of 61 RMB. A multiple linear regression model was also used, and the estimated WTP value was 7.7 RMB per capita per time. Thus, the total economic value was 2967 million RMB by using tourists number of Sushansi National Forest Park in 2011, and accounted a obvious amount of 104% of tourist income as 284 million RMB in 2011. In conclusion, our research about economic evaluation of ecocompensation by WTP is conductive to support scenic planning for tourist enterprises, and arouse awareness of ecology and environmental protection of every citizen