Abstract
Tourism is of great importance to European economies, but environmental degradation could reduce the attractiveness of many European destinations considerably. This is even more evident if the future of tourism is depicted in the UN’s Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development. However, official statistics on the environmental impact of tourism provide only partial information, and almost always with an “accounting scheme” approach, such as occasional and experimental experiences on integrated economic and environmental accounts of tourism. It is necessary to enrich the activity of monitoring and measuring the impact of tourism on the environment and implement policies aimed at increasing the sustainability of the sector. This work intends to contribute to extending information about the theme, providing a new approach based on the integration of official data to study the relationship between tourism and the environment. In detail, the objective of the work is to estimate the level of emissions—in terms of the primary air pollutants—produced by tourists travelling in Italy by road transport in the period 2015–2019. Even if much has to be done to improve the knowledge on the tourism–environment nexus, this paper represents a first relevant step towards an approach that can be easily implemented in all EU countries.
Highlights
The awareness that tourism may heavily affect the environment was reached many years ago [1,2], becoming one of the main topics in the growing green economy
It is generally acknowledged that several tourism subsectors, transportation, face great difficulties in reducing emissions due to interrelated reasons of rapid growth, their energy intensity and the high cost of technology change [22,23]
The total road transport emissions include the emissions produced by all types of vehicles included the category “buses”, which was excluded from the tourism analysis; in addition, the mileage produced by Light Commercial Vehicles and Heavy Duty
Summary
The awareness that tourism may heavily affect the environment was reached many years ago [1,2], becoming one of the main topics in the growing green economy. G20 Tourism Ministers meeting on the 4th of May 2021, after the COVID-19 pandemic, welcomed the Recommendations for the Transition to a Green Travel and Tourism Economy [3]. This work’s central hypothesis and motivation are that it is possible to produce environmental tourism indicators using already available official statistical data used to fulfil other purposes than measuring the environmental impact of tourism. By following this assumption, a new methodology is developed and proposed
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
