Tourism System Resilience and Sustainable Development in Ecologically Fragile Areas: Evidence from Tibet-Related Areas of Sichuan, China

Tourism plays an increasingly important role in promoting economic growth and rural revitalization in ecologically fragile regions. However, tourism systems in Tibet–related areas of Sichuan, China, are highly vulnerable to natural disasters, ecological degradation, and regional development imbalances, posing challenges to sustainable tourism development. This study aims to evaluate tourism system resilience and identify its key influencing factors from a sustainability perspective. Based on the regional characteristics of Tibet-related areas in Sichuan, a comprehensive evaluation framework is constructed covering four subsystems: tourism infrastructure and scale, economy, society, and ecology. An integrated entropy weight–analytic hierarchy process (AHP) model, coupling coordination model, and obstacle degree model are employed to assess tourism system resilience and examine subsystem interactions using panel data from 2011 to 2020. The results indicate that: (1) the resilience levels of tourism subsystems show no clear spatial or temporal regularity across the study areas; (2) ecological resilience remains significantly lower than tourism, economic, and social resilience, representing the weakest component of the tourism system; (3) the coupling coordination among subsystems remains at a low level, suggesting insufficient synergy for sustainable regional development; and (4) ecological constraints are the primary limiting factors affecting overall tourism system resilience. This study contributes to sustainable tourism research by revealing the critical role of ecological governance and subsystem coordination in enhancing tourism resilience in ecologically sensitive regions. Policy implications include strengthening ecological protection, improving tourism infrastructure, promoting digital tourism marketing, and advancing rural revitalization to achieve long-term sustainable development. However, this study is limited by data availability and the spatial scope of the selected case-study areas, which may affect the generalizability of the findings.