From Heritage Preservation to Sustainable Transition: The Role of Low-Carbon Narratives in Forest-Based Tourism

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🔬研究者:Provides empirical evidence on communication framing effects in sustainable tourism, useful for scholars in tourism studies and environmental communication.

🏢実務担当者:Tourism operators and heritage site managers can use low-carbon narratives to attract sustainability-conscious visitors and enhance perceived relevance.

🏛政策担当者:Offers insights for designing low-carbon tourism policies and promoting heritage sites as transition hubs in sustainable development strategies.

This paper examines how forest by-products (potash, tar, resin and charcoal—PoTaRCh), with a special focus on charcoal production, are presented in contemporary heritage tourism and how different communication frameworks influence the audience’s perceptions and intentions in the context of low-carbon development. The research is based on a combined methodological approach. Qualitative analysis of 70 communication units from the field of heritage tourism identified three dominant communication frames: traditional heritage, ecological-educational frame and future-oriented low-carbon innovation. These findings served as the basis for the experimental part of the research, conducted through an online A/B test on a sample of 212 adult respondents interested in travel, cultural tourism and heritage-based experiences. The results of the experiment indicate that the low-carbon communication framework leads to statistically significantly higher levels of perceived relevance of PoTaRCh, visit intention and positive attitude towards sustainability compared to the traditional framework, with perceived relevance partially mediating these effects. The findings suggest that, although traditional communication patterns still dominate heritage tourism, the future-oriented low-carbon framework shows greater communication potential for attracting a sustainability- and future-oriented audience. By combining the analysis of communication content from several European countries and the experimental testing of communication frameworks, the research provides an empirical contribution to the understanding of the transition from the concept of heritage-as-preservation to heritage-as-transition in contemporary discourses of sustainable tourism.

• openalex https://doi.org/10.3390/heritage9050158first seen 2026-05-17 05:22:54 · last seen 2026-05-23 05:29:27