Carbon labels in tourism: persuasive communication?

Abstract

Ecolabels are widespread tools for policy and marketing in many industry sectors. Carbon labels focussing on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions are one specialised category of ecolabel in use by tourism corporations. All ecolabels, including carbon labels, rely on persuasive communication: i.e., providing technical information to individuals in ways that induce them to change relevant behaviours. This requires that individuals understand that information, appreciate its significance, trust its reliability, and know how to act more sustainably. Here, these four criteria are applied to a set of tourism carbon label schemes, to assess whether the information provided by existing labels is comprehensive. Secondly, results are presented from a survey of environmentally aware tourists and their perspectives of two different types of carbon labels. Results indicate that tourism carbon label schemes suffer significant shortcomings both from the theoretical perspective of communications analysis and from the practical perspective of tourist understanding and action. Results indicate that even if tourists care about their climate change impacts, carbon labels are currently ineffective because of deficiencies in communications. Since such deficiencies can be overcome, there are opportunities for carbon labels to become more widely and successfully used.