Impacts of Yulong Mountain Glacier on Tourism in Lijiang

Introduction The mountain tourism has been repeatedly identified as potentially vulnerable to global climate change and has received greater research attention. Implications of climate change can be seen, for example, in less snow, receding glaciers, melt…

Impacts of Yulong Mountain glacier on tourism in Lijiang

The glacier on the Yulong Mountain is one of the most important attractions in Lijiang, Yunnan, China. But it keeps retreating these years due to global warming, which is bound to influence regional tourism significantly in Lijiang. This study estimates the effects of the glacier retreat of the Yulong Mountains on tourism there. Primary data were collected through a visitor survey including demographics, motives, lengths of stay, and opinions about each tourism resource from tourists to Lijiang, as well as questions about which scenic spot(s) they had visited or would visit, how much they expended per day during their visit and how their visiting behavior would be changed upon the hypothesis that the glacier would disappear. These data were used to analyze the proportion of the contribution of glacier to the tourism in Lijiang and estimate the impact of glacier on the regional tourism quantitatively. According to the survey, it could be concluded that three quarters of the tourists to Lijiang were interested in the Yulong Mountain glacier, indicating that the glacier possesses notable appeal for sightseeing tourists. The results of our analysisshowed that about 689,013~1,508,247 tourists, accounting for 19.63~42.97 % of the total 3,510,000 domestic tourists to Lijiang in 2004, would not come to Lijiang in the absence of the glacier, resulting in a possible direct economic loss of 84,382,508 ~ 184,713,011 USD (viz. 700,374,824 ~ 1,533,117,993 RMB) and a markedly decrease in the attraction radius.