Effective and Sustainable Managed Protected Areas: Evaluation and Driving Factors of Eco-Efficiency of China's Forest Parks

Forest parks are key protected areas that protect biodiversity and important ecosystems with a high efficiency and low cost and have become an international research area of high interest. Eco-efficiency is an important tool to measure the sustainable development of natural protected areas and provides a valuable decision reference for policy-makers. This research constructs a comprehensive performance evaluation system for forest park ecosystems, economic systems, and environmental systems. The undesired output model (SBM), spatial analysis, and panel Tobit regression model are applied to measure and analyze the forest park eco-efficiency in 30 provinces and autonomous regions of the Chinese mainland from 1990 to 2019, as well as the temporal and spatial differentiation characteristics and their driving factors. The results show that (1) both the average level of eco-efficiency and economic efficiency of forest parks show a declining trend; (2) the eco-efficiency of forest parks shows high-efficiency zones in the northeast and northwest, medium-efficiency zones in the west, and low-efficiency zones in the middle region of the Chinese mainland; (3) forest parks in the eastern region with a higher-than-average efficiency are located in Tianjin and Zhejiang Province, while the western region with lower efficiency is located in Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Qinghai, and Gansu Province; and (4) the forest park tourism service quality has an important impact on forest parks' eco-efficiency, but the entertainment activity has a significant negative impact on the eco-efficiency of forest parks. Finally, suggestions are proposed for the sustainable and green development of forest park ecological tourism.