WVU Extension touts rural tourism
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For rural communities across the region, tourism can provide significant economic opportunities, yet as these opportunities grow, communities often face challenges. But, that's where West Virginia University Extension and the Tourism, Resiliency and Indicators for Post-Pandemic Planning (TRIP) project can help.
This collaborative project, led by Doug Arbogast, WVU Extension professor and rural tourism development specialist, includes partners in the WVU Davis College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, as well as Penn State University Extension, University of Vermont Extension, University of New Hampshire Extension and the Northeast Regional Center for Rural Development.
Leveraging the resources of the land-grant universities involved, this project aims to enhance the sustainability and resiliency of rural destinations by providing research-based information for rural gateway destinations seeking to address post-COVID 19 opportunities and challenges.
In a recent study, published in the journal Tourism Economics, researchers from the NERCRD and WVU Extension developed a sustainability index to assess how tourism affects counties according to a number of factors that measure the areas' economic, social and environmental well-being.
They found that counties relying heavily on tourism varied widely in their ability to keep it from overwhelming local resources, with no destination performing well on every dimension. Critically, the researchers said, the index allowed them to measure counties' sustainability as it changed over a period of 10 years instead of at one point in time.
"Post COVID-19, we've seen a surge of interest from local destination leadership to better understand how to manage the economic, social and environmental impacts of tourism," Arbogast said. "This project was designed to work directly with destination leadership to better understand how land-grant universities can help them to identify relevant data across these dimensions that can then be utilized to make informed, evidence-based decisions in order to harness the positive impacts tourism can bring while mitigating the negative impacts."
While the project incorporates surveys, spatial and qualitative methods, a considerable focus is placed on using secondary data to provide a more cost-effective method for analyzing a breadth of data on the people, organizations and places that may otherwise be difficult to collect.
Government agencies often offer free data for geographies across the nation and spanning multiple years allowing local stakeholders to quickly and easily monitor change in the destination over time and compare characteristics and trends in their destination relative to other peer and aspirational places.
The Cooperative Extension partners on the grant are taking a deep dive in targeted case study regions across the northeast to help local leaders unpack the data, including the Monongahela National Forest region of West Virginia where Arbogast and Daniel Eades, WVU Extension professor and rural economic specialist, have been supporting the Mon Forest Towns partnership since its inception in 2018. Conversations with community leaders over the past eight years have helped to pinpoint the most relevant indicators.
"The economic impacts of tourism and recreation are often front of mind, but communities recognize that to be successful in the long run, they need to balance the social and environmental dimensions as well. Stakeholders are consistently talking about the importance of a living wage, affordable, quality housing, attracting and retaining young families," Eades said.
He added, "By working directly with each of the 12 Mon Forest Towns, we are co-creating an impact monitoring platform that can help inform policy and planning across all the dimensions of sustainability ensuring that the benefits of tourism don't come at the expense of residents and working families."
This process and the associated outcomes were recently presented at the Travel and Tourism Research Association's annual conference in Greenville, SC. Next steps include data collection of community indicators, incorporating subjective data from resident and visitor surveys, developing a data dashboard monitoring system to further encourage the use of the data to inform local policy and planning, continuing to engage local stakeholders in data collection and monitoring, and testing the methods in other destinations.
The TRIP project is supported by funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture.
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