Abstract
In the present article we investigate the geography and magnitude of the climate footprint of long-distance travel with Brussels, Belgium, as a destination. The internationally networked position of this city goes hand in hand with a strong dependence on international mobility, which largely materializes in impressive volumes of long-distance travel and associated consumption of important amounts of fossil fuel. Despite a surge in concerns about global warming, the climate footprint of most international travel, notably air travel, is not included in the official national and regional climate inventories, or in other words, it is not territorialized. The official climate footprint of the Brussels-Capital Region attained 3.7 Mton CO<sub>2</sub>eq per year (in 2017). Based on our exploratory calculations, however, the total estimated climate footprint of all Brussels-bound international travel equalled an additional 2.7 Mton CO<sub>2</sub>eq. In terms of geographical distribution, over 70% of international travellers to Brussels come from Europe, while these represent only 15% of the climate footprint of all international travel to Brussels. We conclude that the practice of not allocating emissions caused by international travel to territorial units has kept the magnitude and complexity of this problem largely under the radar and contributes to the lack of societal support for curbing growth of international aviation.
Highlights
A Territorial Approach to the Climate Footprint of International Travel the climate footprint of long‐distance travel is not a new object of study in the academic literature, the theme has only recently seeped into the public climate debate (Wolrath Söderberg & Wormbs, 2019) and is not included in often‐cited indicators such as national green‐ house gas inventories that need to be maintained by all industrialized countries (‘Annex I countries’) under theUrban Planning, 2021, Volume 6, Issue 2, Pages 285–298Kyoto protocol (Gössling, 2013), according to prevailing agreements
In 2018, the Brussels‐Capital Region registered around 2.9 million international arrivals in registered tourist accommodation
We were unable to cover international overnight visi‐ tors who stayed in unregistered accommodation, which means that our analysis significantly underestimates the total number of tourists to Brussels
Summary
A Territorial Approach to the Climate Footprint of International Travel the climate footprint of long‐distance travel is not a new object of study in the academic literature (see, e.g., Patterson & McDonald, 2004; Sun, Cadarso, & Driml, 2020; Wood, Bows, & Anderson, 2010), the theme has only recently seeped into the public climate debate (Wolrath Söderberg & Wormbs, 2019) and is not included in often‐cited indicators such as national green‐ house gas inventories that need to be maintained by all industrialized countries (‘Annex I countries’) under theUrban Planning, 2021, Volume 6, Issue 2, Pages 285–298Kyoto protocol (Gössling, 2013), according to prevailing agreements. While in recent years serious efforts were done to make aviation accountable for its contri‐ bution to global warming, through instruments such as the EU Emissions Trading System (within the European Economic Area, since 2012) and the aviation sector’s own carbon offset scheme CORSIA (as from 2021; Larsson, Elofsson, Sterner, & Åkerman, 2019), governments of nations, regions, or cities are not eager to recognize own‐ ership of the emissions that are associated with long‐ distance travel towards or from their territories This attitude is implicitly supported by national greenhouse gas inventory regulations that do not allocate such emis‐ sions to individual countries (Warnecke, Schneider, Day, La Hoz Theuer, & Fearnehough, 2019). The emissions from international transport are absent from the climate inventories but seem under‐ exposed in the climate debate itself
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