The Benefits Don't Always Outweigh the Costs: The Sustainability of Tourism in Tibet and Ganzi Prefecture

Abstract

The growth of tourism in Tibet is championed as a win-win situation for everyone involved. The Chinese government promotes tourism in order to build a modern economy, provide jobs to the local people, and connect the Tibetan Plateau to the outside world, all the while preserving its native culture and nature. Yet the rapid pace at which mass-tourism is expanding within this fragile environment raises concerns about the potential costs of tourism-driven development. A lack of empirical understanding of the social and environmental impacts may be hindering the sustainable development of Tibet. This thesis is an evaluation of these potential negative impacts, the costs they impose on society, and their implications for tourism as a development policy in Tibet. To conduct this evaluation, I propose the following research question: What are the negative environmental impacts of tourism in Tibet, and how do the impacts evaluated as costs compare against the benefits? I approach the research question through two main objectives: analyzing Tibet’s tourism on a regional level through a conceptual framework and the literature, and conducting a case study cost-benefit analysis of recent tourism growth in Ganzi Prefecture. First, I present a conceptual framework to examine how tourism management and natural resource management interact to produce environmental outcomes. I combine these findings with an indepth analysis of the literature on Tibet to form a conclusion about the overall sustainability of tourism in the region. The evidence suggests that the environmental and social impacts of tourism and its related development in Tibet are not sustainable over the long-term. The natural resource management practices of tourism-led development results in high rates of loss of natural resource stock and quality. Moreover, tourism-led development is not sustainable for the Tibetan people because it does not invest directly in local human resources, resulting in uneven distribution of tourism benefits for the indigenous population and uncertainty about their ability to sustain beneficial livelihoods over the long-term. Second, I hypothesize that tourism in Ganzi Prefecture incurs significant costs through the degradation of natural resources. To test this hypothesis, I conduct a cost-benefit analysis of tourism in Ganzi Prefecture through a cost estimation of three primary environmental impacts: land-use change, pollution, and CO2 emissions. I also conduct a survey of Ganzi locals and tourists to assess these groups’ perceptions of environmental damages. The baseline scenario of the cost-benefit analysis finds that the environmental costs are a significant majority of the benefits. The high-cost scenario that incorporates higher prices for environmental damages finds that there is a net loss of 4.9% and 53.2% of the benefits in the periods of 2006- 2016 and 2017-2036 respectively, meaning that costs are potentially greater than benefits and increasing over time. In addition, the survey results support the existence of these costs by showing that tourists are willing to pay for more environmental protection, and that Ganzi locals place high negative value on the environmental damages that are occurring. I conclude with discussions on the change in results if the cost-benefit analysis was expanded, the implications of the findings, the challenges to mitigating the impacts, and policy recommendations for achieving more sustainable development in Tibet through tourism.