Strategic prioritisation of zero waste and low-carbon tourism in UNESCO global geoparks: a hybrid fuzzy AHP-VIKOR decision support framework

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🔬研究者:The hybrid FAHP-VIKOR framework provides a methodological template for multi-criteria decision-making in sustainability contexts, especially where stakeholder ambiguity and linguistic uncertainty are prevalent.

🏢実務担当者:Geopark management teams and local tourism authorities can use the identified critical success factors (institutional governance, waste infrastructure) and priority strategies (regulated carrying capacity, circular supply chains) to guide resource allocation and policy design.

🏛政策担当者:Policymakers should note that achieving zero-waste and low-carbon tourism requires simultaneous investment in regulatory capacity and local circular economy infrastructure, rather than sequential interventions.

Resource governance, rather than institutional goodwill, is the primary driver for the transition to zero-waste and low-carbon tourism (ZW-LCT) in UNESCO Global Geoparks. The structural interplay between geoheritage conservation and escalating pressure from tourism development creates particularly critical conditions in karst systems, where solid waste accumulation and carbon emissions frequently exceed the carrying capacity of management infrastructure. This research focuses on the Dong Van Karst Plateau within the newly consolidated Tuyen Quang Province (13,795.5 km 2 , post-2025 merger), examining the critical success factors (CSFs) that determine ZW-LCT readiness against a target of 6.0 million annual visitors by 2030. Drawing on the resource-based view and institutional theory, and applying a hybrid FAHPVIKOR framework to expert judgements from a 25-member multidisciplinary panel, providing a setting in which linguistic ambiguity and inter-expert disagreement are expected rather than exceptional. The research identifies institutional governance (weight: 0.312) and technological waste infrastructure (0.278) to be the dominant structural determinants, jointly accounting for approximately 59% of the total weight. An initial pool of 18 sub-criteria was reduced to 12 through Content Validity Ratio screening (Lawshe, 1975). Progress in waste circularity and decarbonisation, the data confirm, is fundamentally a system-design problem rather than a behavioural one. VIKOR analysis of seven priority strategies further identifies regulated carrying capacity (Qi = 0.000) and local circular supply chains (Qi = 0.093) as the most practically defensible compromise solutions, the advantage gap falling below the DQ threshold of 0.167, requiring both interventions to advance simultaneously rather than sequentially for reconciling heritage conservation with tourism expansion. The zero-waste-carbon nexus is proposed herein as a novel analytical lens, serving as the foundation for a data-driven roadmap designed to manage resource trade-offs in geologically fragile settings.

• openalex https://doi.org/10.5276/jswtm/iswmaw/522-1/2026.712first seen 2026-07-13 05:53:50