Impacts of the emissions policies on tourism: An important but neglected aspect of sustainable tourism

Abstract

According with a growing sense of climate change in recent decades, an increasing number of works have focused on the impacts of climate on tourism. However, few studies to date have investigated the impacts of various emissions policies on tourism, leading to an ambiguous understanding of tourism adaption to emissions policy change. Here this study attempted to provide a framework to guide future research on tourism change under the leading emissions policies worldwide (i.e. the carbon tax and emissions trading scheme). Regarding the policy setting, this study suggests both the policy diversification within the emissions trading scheme or carbon tax and their comprehensive study. Regarding the research subject, this study recommends taking into account overall or sectoral impacts on different tourism economic and environmental variables. Moreover, future efforts should be devoted to not only simulating future change but also quantifying the actual impacts on tourism based on existing data. Regarding the methodology, this study strongly recommends four methods for assessing the impacts of emissions policies on tourism, including the augmented computable general equilibrium model, dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model, difference-in-differences method, and regression discontinuity method.