CARRYING CAPACITY IN DANUBE’S DELTA — LINK BETWEEN LOCAL ECONOMY DEVELOPMENT AND ENVIRONMENTAL RESOURCES PROTECTION

Ruxan­dra-Euge­nia POP

Research Insti­tute for Agri­cul­tur­al Econ­o­my and Rur­al Devel­op­ment
Cor­re­spond­ing author e‑mail: pop.ruxandra @ iceadr.ro

Abstract: Dur­ing COASTAL project, financed through  Hori­zon 2020 pro­gram, research team car­ried out a mod­el­ling activ­i­ty, for the three main eco­nom­ic activ­i­ties for Danube’s Delta study case area: agri­cul­ture, aqua­cul­ture and tourism. Regard­ing the tourism in Danube’s Delta region, we want­ed to find the answer to the fol­low­ing ques­tion:  How far can be  devel­oped Danube’s Delta area with­out dam­ag­ing the envi­ron­ment? To achieve one of the main objec­tive of mod­el­ling activ­i­ty, sev­er­al para­me­ters with which the mod­el oper­ates where used, such as car­ry­ing capac­i­ty, vari­able of inter­est both for gen­er­at­ing income with­in the tourist activ­i­ty and to ensure the sus­tain­abil­i­ty of the area from envi­ron­ment per­spec­tive. There­fore, Car­ry­ing capac­i­ty rep­re­sent the cen­tral theme of this paper and we used dif­fer­ent  approach­es from a con­cep­tu­al, math­e­mat­i­cal and log­i­cal point of view.  Also, we pre­sent­ed ele­ments of tourist demand and sup­ply in the Danube Delta, in order to be able to com­pare the cur­rent­ly exist­ing car­ry­ing capac­i­ty of the study case area with the hypo­thet­i­cal val­ue,  cal­cu­lat­ed among this paper.
Key­words: Danube’s Delta, tourism, car­ry­ing capac­i­ty, rur­al devel­op­ment, tourism mar­ket­ing
JEL clas­si­fi­ca­tion: O13, Q18