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Abstract:
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Recently, tourism activities in Quang Binh Province have been growing rapidly,
especially since the Phong Nha - Ke Bang National Park was certified as the World Natural
Heritage in 2004. Among the tourist sites of Quang Binh, Phong Nha and Dong Hoi tourism centers
are the two places which attract the largest numbers of visitors. The rapid but unplanned tourism
activities have been creating various social and environmental concerns. If appropriate planning
measures are not derived from the consideration of the carrying capacities of these sites, tourism
centers will be overloaded, tourism quality will be degraded and therefore the benefit obtained
from tourism activities will be reduced. This paper presents the tentative establishment of a method
to calculate the environmental carrying capacities of three basic components: ecological, economic
and social. As the results, the carrying capacities of several tourism activities are quantitatively
evaluated for Phong Nha tourism center. The resulting carrying capacities for Phong Nha cave
sightseeing, ecotourism forest hiking and cable car ridding are 43893, 1450 and 33000 visits per day
respectively. With respect to the Dong Hoi tourism center, the carrying capacities of local beaches are
71000 visits per day. These estimates can be used as the preliminary benchmarks for later tourism
planning of the two tourism centers: Phong Nha - Ke Bang and Dong Hoi. |