Impact of Saiful Malook national park on the sustainable livelihood of Naran and Kaghan communities, Pakistan
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Impact of Saiful Malook national park on the sustainable livelihood of Naran and Kaghan communities, Pakistan Tariq Rauf . Cao Yukan . Muhammad Zada . Naveed Khan . Syed Jamal Shah
Ó Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Abstract National parks have been observed to have lots of socio-economic advantages on the livelihood of host communities. The study examined the impact of Saiful Malook national park on the economy and livelihood of the people of Naran and Kaghan Communities in Pakistan. Primary and secondary sources of data were employed for the study. The study revealed that there is a significant difference in the number of indigenous and non-indigenous people involved in ecotourism activities in the area. The study also observed that 33% and 28% of the entire visitors to the park got information about the park and its facilities through the social media and friends and family members and these were the strongest medium
of awareness of the national park. The study result also revealed that indigenous people enjoyed more of the accruing benefits from the park than non-indigenous people. It was also observed that although the national park attracts lots of benefits to the host communities such as the provision of employment opportunities, improved family and individual income, there were also observed challenges such as seasonality of tourism activities in the park and changes in the cultural values of the local people. Based on these findings, the study recommended that government and the management of the park should use all available medium of communication to advertise and market the park facilities and products to improve the number of visitors to the park and its patronage.
T. Rauf C. Yukan M. Zada N. Khan College of Economic and Management, Northeast Forestry University, Harbin, People’s Republic of China e-mail: [email protected]
Keywords Ecotourism National park Socioeconomic Sustainable development Livelihoods
C. Yukan e-mail: [email protected] M. Zada e-mail: [email protected] N. Khan e-mail: [email protected] S. J. Shah (&) School of Management, Harbin Institute of Technology, Room# 352, 2H Building, Science Park, Harbin 150001, Heilongjiang Province, People’s Republic of China e-mail: [email protected]
Introduction Ecotourism is one of the fastest growing industries in the world (Shah et al. 2013). It is the largest smokeless industry that attracts steady increasing number of patronage with less negative impacts on the environment (Alhroot 2013). Ecotourism is a branch of tourism that deals with increasing appreciation of nature experiences and corresponding benefits which
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could be social, economic or environmental in nature (Saufi et al. 2013; Enang et al. 2017). Today, ecotourism have provided a niche for man’s interaction with nature and its socio-economic potentials to destination regions cannot be overemphasized. National parks across the world have been observed as the greatest asset of ecotourism as it
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