Remaking Tourism Carrying Capacity Frameworks for Geoparks

Abstract

The concept of geopark was first officially proposed by UNESCO in 1999. Since then, there is an increasing interest in how the management purpose of geoparks can be fulfilled. However, no tailor-made management framework for geoparks is available so far. Six existing tourism carrying capacity (TCC) frameworks for national parks, i.e. Recreation Opportunity Spectrum (ROS), Limits of Acceptable Change (LAC), Visitor Impact Management (VIM), Visitor Experience and Resource Protection (VERP), Visitor Activity Management Process (VAMP), and Tourism Optimization Management Model (TOMM) are reviewed. It is found that they are all developed to manage national parks in an environmentally sustainable way, but they commonly failed to equally address the interests of all stakeholders which makes the direct application of these framework in geoparks inappropriate. The concept of tourism carrying capacity provides benefits in terms of raising awareness on sustainable tourism in national parks and the six traditional tourism carrying capacity frameworks are imperative to be modified for use in geoparks. Therefore we proposed a modified tourism carrying capacity concept for use in geoparks and remodeled 3existing tourism carrying capacity frameworks for the sustainable tourism management in geoparks.