Development trajectory for the temporal and spatial evolution of the resilience of regional tourism environmental systems in 14 cities of Gansu Province, China

Abstract

The rapid development of the urban economy in China and the accompanying income growth experienced by urban residents have increased demand for tourism and leisure, which has brought pressure on the urban tourism environment system (UTES), making the contradiction between tourism economic development and the ecological environment increasingly acute. While seeking to rationalize the economic, social, and ecological benefits of tourism, reducing the fragility of the UTES and improving its anti-interference and recovery capabilities have become attracted significant attention from scholars in China and elsewhere. This paper establishes a definition of resilience for an UTES and constructs an evaluation index system for it in terms of the social, economic, and ecological environments. It also establishes an entropy weight-TOPSIS resilience evaluation model to measure resilience in regional systems, using ArcGIS to analyze the standard deviation ellipse and center of the gravity track of the resilience. System dynamics was used to construct diagrams of causal relationships and stock flow for the constituent elements of UTES to show the mechanisms that promote its resilience. This paper investigates 14 cities of Gansu Province in particular to simulate the resilience model of a regional system.