Abstract
To balance tourism’s economic benefit and environmental pollution, this paper proposes an analytical approach by using the input–output (IO) model and tourism satellite accounts (TSA). Four steps are taken: (1) the setting of system boundaries according to the combined IO and TSA database; (2) economic benefit estimation for tourism income, sectoral multipliers and inter-sector linkages; (3) environmental pollution estimation of direct and indirect CO2 emissions; and (4) a policy analysis to balance the economic benefit and CO2 emissions (in terms of reducing the CO2 emissions intensity) in tourism-related sectors. In the case of Beijing, some interesting insights can be obtained. Beijing’s tourism sectors experienced a fast economic growth and a clear decrease in CO2 emissions during 2007–2012, with the former having a greater absolute change rate (particularly for the shopping and sightseeing sectors). In all tourism sectors (except for transportation), the indirect CO2 emissions were over three times greater than the direct CO2 emissions. Transportation was a leading contributor to both the economic benefit (representing 91.65% of tourism income in 2012) and to environmental pollution (representing 38.75% of tourism-related CO2 emissions). The detailed findings regarding the industrial and energy structures offer insightful policies for a high-benefit and low-emissions development of tourism.
Highlights
With fast-growing tourism demands, tourism-related sectors have played a dominant role in the economic systems of most developed and developing countries [1,2]
Most related studies have only considered the CO2 emissions directly generated by tourists in their tourism activities but have ignored the indirect CO2 emissions generated from the production, manufacturing, and the tourism management authority activities involved in the normal operations of the tourism industry
For the tourism consumption items in the tourism satellite account (TSA), the principle of the Kyoto Protocol specifies that geographic territory determines carbon dioxide responsibility [46]; this study only considers tourist activities that occur within a domestic region and addresses CO2 emissions associated with domestic tourism consumption, inbound tourism consumption, and tourism consumption incurred domestically in relation to outbound travel and airfare paid to the national carriers
Summary
With fast-growing tourism demands, tourism-related sectors have played a dominant role in the economic systems of most developed and developing countries [1,2]. Previous studies have supported that the tourism sectors may have an adverse effect on the environment in the form of CO2 emissions [21,22], the transportation sector [23,24,25], catering and accommodation [21,26,27] Concurring with this view, the negative effect of tourism benefit, i.e., the tourist-related increase in CO2 emissions has been reported for a number of countries, including China [28,29], New Zealand [26,30], Norway [31], Australia [32], Sweden [33], and in 14 Caribbean countries [34]. The IO model can be effectively used in computing carbon dioxide emissions for the tourism industry, including direct and indirect emissions [5,35,36,42] In this context, this paper employs the IO model to investigate the economic benefit and CO2 emissions of the tourism industry in Beijing. 4 concludes the paper and outlines major directions of future research
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