Ecology Emerges as Dominant Driver of Tourism Resilience in China’s Jiziwan

Tourism is famously fragile. Recessions, pandemics, political conflict, extreme weather and ecological degradation can all strip a destination of the resources and appeal that sustain its economy, and few places illustrate that vulnerability better than the arid and semi-arid bend of China’s Yellow River known as Jiziwan. A new study published in Environmental and Sustainability Indicators has now mapped, in unusual technical depth, what actually keeps the tourism economies of this ecologically sensitive region resilient, and the answer is emphatically green. Across 21 prefecture-level cities and thirteen years of data, the ecological environment turned out to be the single most influential driver of tourism economic resilience, outpacing regional wealth, social conditions and even the much-hyped force of technological innovation.

The research team, led by Xu Yuhui with Batunacun and colleagues, focused on Jiziwan, a region spanning roughly 790,000 square kilometres across Inner Mongolia, Gansu, Ningxia, Shaanxi and Shanxi. Home to about 48 million permanent residents, the area drew approximately 627.8 million tourists and 53.4 billion yuan in tourism revenue in 2023 alone. Yet it is also one of the most ecologically fragile corners of the Yellow River Basin, beset by soil erosion, land desertification and acute water scarcity. That combination of rich natural and cultural attractions and a delicate ecosystem makes Jiziwan an ideal natural laboratory for asking a question that has long dogged tourism scholarship: when a destination’s tourism economy bounces back from shocks, is that resilience anchored primarily in the environment, or in a broader constellation of economic, social and technological forces?

To answer it, the researchers first had to measure resilience itself. They built a comprehensive evaluation system grounded in Martin’s economic resilience theory, capturing four dimensions: resistance ability, the capacity to absorb shocks; recovery ability, the capacity to return to a dynamic equilibrium; reconstruction ability, the capacity to reorganise internal structures under stress; and update ability, the capacity to break path dependence through knowledge and innovation. Twenty indicators fed into this framework, ranging from the density of A-level tourist attractions and tourist arrivals to the number of days of good air quality, green coverage rates, highway passenger volumes, university enrolment and tourism research and development funding. Rather than weighting these indicators subjectively, the team applied a genetic algorithm-optimised projection pursuit model, a technique that projects high-dimensional data into a lower-dimensional space and identifies optimal weightings while sidestepping multicollinearity. An entropy weight method used as a cross-check produced broadly consistent rankings, strengthening confidence in the results.

The measurement revealed a tourism economy on the rise, but an uneven one. The composite resilience index for Jiziwan climbed from 0.175 in 2010 to 0.298 in 2023, dipping in 2020 under the impact of COVID-19 before rebounding to its peak. Kernel density estimation showed the entire distribution shifting rightward over time, but also exposed a persistent double peak: a large peak of cities stuck at low resilience and a smaller peak of high performers, with a right trailing tail signalling entrenched regional disparity. Spatially, resilience declined steadily from the centre of the region to its periphery in every year examined. Cities such as Hohhot, Ordos, Yulin and Taiyuan formed a resilient core, with Taiyuan standing alone at the high-resilience level by 2023, while five western cities, including Alxa, Bayannur, Wuhai, Zhongwei and Baiyin, remained trapped at low levels throughout the study period. Global Moran’s I statistics confirmed weak positive spatial autocorrelation, significant in 2015 and 2020 but not in 2010 or 2023, pointing to localised clustering rather than region-wide spatial dependence.

The methodological heart of the study, and its most novel contribution, lies in how the drivers were identified. Conventional tools each carry well-known limitations: geographic detectors struggle to rank drivers against one another, regression analysis leans on linear assumptions, structural equation models typically yield a single global optimum, and qualitative approaches are subjective and hard to visualise. The team instead turned to partial order theory and the Hasse diagram technique, mathematical tools previously applied to chemical risk assessment, groundwater quality and land degradation, but never before to tourism. Partial order theory ranks comparable elements across multiple criteria without requiring complete ordering, ignores multicollinearity within driver groups, and preserves the information of every indicator. The Hasse diagram technique then renders those partial orders as directed graphs in which maximal elements mark the most strongly influenced cities and chains trace the descending ranking of influence. Fifteen indicators across four driver groups, regional economy, social environment, ecological environment and technological innovation, were compared across 21 cities in three periods: 2010 to 2015, 2015 to 2020 and 2020 to 2023, generating twelve partially ordered sets and twelve Hasse diagrams.

The verdict was unambiguous. In the first period, the ecological environment dominated in 15 of the 21 cities, ahead of social environment with 11, regional economy with 9 and technological innovation with 8. In the second period, the ecological environment again led with 15 cities. By the third period, its reach had expanded to 18 cities, while technological innovation surged from 5 cities in the first period to 11, overtaking the regional economy to claim second place. The regional economy and social environment remained relatively stable influences, with the economy weakening in the northwest and strengthening in the centre-south, and the social environment showing the reverse pattern. The overall picture, the authors conclude, is a multi-dimensional synergistic driving pattern operating under the relative dominance of the ecological environment, a finding confirmed as statistically significant by fixed-effects panel regression in which all four driver groups and nearly all individual indicators showed significant associations with resilience.

Why does the environment loom so large here? The explanation lies in what Jiziwan’s tourism actually sells. Unlike heavily urbanised destinations that trade on cultural landscapes, service infrastructure and urban consumption, this region’s products rest on pleasant climates, vast grasslands, clean rivers, deserts, waterfalls and biodiversity. The quality of the ecological landscape is not one input among many; it is the raw material of the entire tourism economy. Technological innovation, the study argues, functions mainly as a tool for amplifying the value of those ecological resources and improving management efficiency, and cannot substitute for the environmental foundation that shapes attractiveness and resource supply. At the same time, tourism offers ecologically fragile regions a pathway to development that traditional resource-intensive industries cannot, converting ecological advantages into economic benefits through ecotourism, rural tourism and Yellow River cultural tourism, while channelling revenue back into biodiversity protection and environmental education.

Policy has amplified this natural advantage. The researchers identified twelve major ecological policies shaping the region, spanning three tiers: overarching national strategies such as the Three-North shelterbelt project and desertification control; Yellow River Basin-specific programmes linking ecological protection with cultural inheritance and tourism; and local initiatives including wetland restoration, ecological corridors and the development of the Yellow River cultural tourism belt. This cascade of macro-strategic guidance, river-basin support and local implementation has systematically improved environmental quality, raised tourism attractiveness and reinforced the ecological environment’s dominant position in the resilience system. The study also flags the exceptions that prove the rule: in Yulin, Yan’an and Shuozhou, cities at the intersection of the Loess Plateau and the Mu Us Sandy Land whose economies centre on coal and petroleum extraction, mining has so degraded sewage treatment capacity, surface stability and vegetation that the ecological environment exerted no positive influence on resilience in the most recent period.

The practical payoff is a differentiated policy map. The team classified the 21 cities into five strategic categories: ecological restoration-oriented cities such as Alxa, Bayannur, Ulanqab and Linfen, which should prioritise conservation and control development intensity; technology empowerment-oriented cities such as Hohhot, Taiyuan, Yan’an and Luliang, encouraged to deploy virtual and augmented reality and strengthen real-time risk monitoring; economic structure optimisation-oriented cities such as Baiyin, Luliang and Baotou, which can deepen industrial chains and cultivate new tourism business models; infrastructure improvement-oriented cities such as Ordos, Yulin, Baiyin and Wuhai, which need stronger transport, accommodation and public health systems; and regional coordination-oriented cities such as Hohhot, Baotou and Taiyuan, which should build cross-regional governance mechanisms, linked tourism routes and shared markets. Former mining cities, the authors suggest, could pursue green transformation through industrial heritage tourism.

The authors are candid about the limits of their analysis. Because the study area contains only 21 prefecture-level cities, spatial econometric models were not applied, and the results should be read as direct local associations rather than a full account of spatial spillovers between neighbouring cities. Future work with larger samples, longer panels and spatial lag, error or Durbin models could sharpen the picture. Even so, the study delivers a rare quantitative answer to a question usually left to qualitative argument, and its message resonates far beyond the Yellow River bend: in ecologically fragile destinations, protecting the environment is not a constraint on tourism resilience but its very foundation, and the first application of partial order theory to tourism research offers a transferable template for proving it.

Subject of Research: Drivers of tourism economic resilience in the ecologically fragile Jiziwan region of China's Yellow River Basin

Article Title: Ecological environment dominant or multi-dimensional drivers? A study on the drivers of tourism economic resilience in Jiziwan, China

Article References: Yuhui, X., Batunacun, Changan, Kaixin, L., Yufeng, Yongmei, & Dandan, Z. (2026). Ecological environment dominant or multi-dimensional drivers? A study on the drivers of tourism economic resilience in Jiziwan, China. Environmental and Sustainability Indicators, 32, Article 101505. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.indic.2026.101505

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.indic.2026.101505

Keywords: tourism economic resilience, ecological environment, Jiziwan, Yellow River Basin, partial order theory, Hasse diagram, GA-PP model, ecologically fragile regions, technological innovation, spatial heterogeneity, ecotourism, China