Abstract:

Objective: With China's socioeconomic development, people's increasing demand for a better life has increased the possibility and enthusiasm of public participation in ecological forest conservation. The purpose of this study is to explore the willingness and impacts of public participation in ecological forest protection, in order to provide a scientific basis for policy making. Method: an onsite survey was conducted on tourists in Taibai Mountain National Forest Park in 2019, and 410 valid questionnaires were collected. In the view of forest eco-tourism, the theory of planned behavior was expanded by adding variables of environmental emotion and ecological forest cognition. A theoretical model of factors influencing the willingness to protect ecological forest including physical action, persuasive action, financial action, and civic action was constructed and empirically demonstrated through structural equation modeling. Results: 1) All the fitted parameters of the model met the recommended value requirements, indicating that the fitting of the model was acceptable with good fitting; 2) All the initial hypotheses used in the model were tested to be true, and most of the hypotheses were verified at the significance level of 0.01; 3) 90% (369), 80% (328) and 70% (287) of the number of questionnaires were selected for fitting, and the model passed the robustness test, indicating that the Results of this study were reliable; 4) From the perspective of gender, women were only stronger than men in the willingness of financial action, and there was no significant gender difference in the other three types of protective behavioral willingness. Age had a great influence on willingness of both civic action and physical action. Compared with groups younger than 19, the 30-49 age group had a higher level of willingness of both civic action and physical action, and the over-60 age group had a lower level of the willingness of financial action. There was a significant negative relationship between monthly disposable income and the willingness of civic action, the willingness of persuasive action and the willingness of physical action at the significance level of 0.05. Educational level had essentially no significant effect on willingness to engage in the four protective behaviors. Conclusion: Both cognition of ecological forest and environmental emotion had a positive impact on the attitude of protective behavior; besides, the cognition of ecological forest had a greater impact than the environmental emotion. The attitude of protective behavior had a positive impact on the four types of willingness of protective behavior. Overall, in addition to the willingness of financial action, the willingness of physical action, persuasive action and civic action were more vulnerable to the influence of individual subjective judgment. We also found that subjective norm and perceived behavioral control had positive effects on the four types of willingness of protective behavior, among which the willingness of financial action was the most affected by perceived behavioral control. In terms of demographic characteristics, gender, age and average monthly disposable income were found to have an impact on willingness of protective behavior, education level and individual occupation had no significant effects on willingness of protective behavior.

Key words: forest tourism, ecological forest, conservation behavior, tourists, structural equation modeling