Coupling Coordinated Evolution and Forecast of Tourism-Urbanization-Ecological Environment: The Case Study of Chongqing, China

As an important pioneering city in western China, Chongqing’s urbanization and tourism development have brought increasing pressure on the eco-environmental system. This paper presents a comprehensive index system for assessment of the level of tourism based on four aspects: market size, tourism economy, tourism resources, and tourism services. In this paper, we use five indices—economic urbanization, demographic urbanization, social urbanization, spatial urbanization, and cultural urbanization—to establishe a comprehensive index system for urbanization. The developed index system also characterizes the eco-environment based on three factors: eco-environmental pressure, eco-environmental response, and eco-environmental state. A coupling coordination degree model (CCDM) focusing on the degree of coupling coordination between tourism, urbanization, and the eco-environment was established using panel data collected from 2000 to 2017 for Chongqing, China. In addition, we used the gray prediction model to predict the degree of coupling coordination of the three systems in Chongqing from 2018 to 2023. The results showed that (1) overall, despite the twists and turns in the middle of the time period, the degree of coupling coordination of the three systems has become increasingly coordinated over time; (2) the three parameters (α-tourism, ß-urbanization, and d-eco-environmental) that have been widely used in previous studies had little effect on the coupling coordinated system; and (3) according to the prediction results, the degree of coupling coordination of the three systems will continue to rise slowly, and the cooperation between the three systems will be close to perfect by 2023, which means that the development of one system will greatly drive the other two systems.