Tourism ecological welfare and driving factors from the perspective of ecological efficiency: A case study of Changzhou City

The maximization of economic benefit and the minimization of environmental impact have always been the ideal conditions for the sustainable development of tourism. Based on the ecological efficiency model, we innovatively presents a tourism ecological welfare index to analyze the changing trends in and the driving effect of tourism ecological welfare in Changzhou City, China from 1995 to 2017.This study aims to provide new research ideas for the assessment of the industry′s green and sustainable development ability. The findings are as follows.(1) The ecological footprint of Changzhou City first increase and then decrease from 1995 to 2017. The preliminary results have been achieved in energy conservation and emissions reduction. The ecological footprint of all sectors of the tourism industry is constantly growing due to the task of energy conservation and emissions reduction in the future. The per capita resource consumption of tourists is 2.81-9.37 times higher than that of the local residents.(2) The background and tourism ecological efficiency are being increasingly optimized year by year with an increase of 37033 yuan per hm~2 and 44226 yuan per hm~2, respectively. Under the same resource consumption, the economic value of tourism is higher with 14409 yuan per hm~2. While the average annual consumption per tourist is 5.78 times that of the local residents. The development of tourism shows a pattern of "high efficiency and high consumption".(3) The level of tourism ecological welfare fluctuated frequently before 2007 but plummeted in a straight line after 2007. Affected by economies of scale, the green ecological welfare and efficiency of the tourism industry continued to weaken with the city′s resource conservation decreased by 10.7 times.(4) The decomposition method of Logarithmic Mean Disivia Index(LMDI) reveals that the scale and economic effects have a significantly negative driving effect on the change in tourism welfare level, while the efficiency and technology effects have a significantly positive effect. In the future, the tourism industry should change its economic growth model and vigorously advocate energy conservation and emissions reduction, following the path of refined resource utilization and sustainable development to maximize the welfare effect of tourism.