Tourism Emissions Research Articles

On track to net-zero? Large tourism enterprises and climate change

Much recent research on climate change mitigation has focused on carbon intensities, i.e. emissions per unit of economic value, to better understand interrelationships of decarbonization with value. This paper studies large tourism enterprises, which account for a large share of tourism's emissions. Based on annual reports, the paper evaluates greenhouse gas emission and revenue interrelationships for a total of n = 29 large tourism companies including airlines, cruise lines and accommodation businesses. Together, these companies represent about 13% (365 Mt CO2) of global tourism emissions, generating revenues of US$477 billion (in 2019). The paper tracks their total emissions and emission intensities over the period 2015–2019, revealing that large tourism firms are not on track to net-zero. Results show considerable differences in emission intensities between the three tourism subsectors and between individual firms within the subsectors. These findings are discussed against emission reduction needs to mid-century. There is strong evidence that continued growth at industry's expected rates represents an insurmountable barrier to net-zero, contradicting industry narratives of progressively and successfully engaging with climate change mitigation.

Current issues in tourism: Mitigating climate change in sustainable tourism research

This paper adopts a problematising review approach to examine the extent of mitigating climate change research in the sustainable tourism literature. As climate change has developed into an existential global environmental crisis and while tourism's emissions are still increasing, one would expect it to be at the heart of sustainable tourism research. However, from a corpus of 2573 journal articles featuring ‘sustainable tourism’ in their title, abstract, or keywords, only 6.5% covered climate change mitigation. Our critical content analysis of 35 of the most influential papers found that the current methods, scope and traditions of tourism research hamper effective and in-depth research into climate change. Transport, the greatest contributor to tourism's emissions, was mostly overlooked, and weak definitions of sustainability were common. Tight system boundaries, lack of common definitions and incomplete data within tourism studies appear to hamper assessing ways to mitigate tourism's contribution to climate change.

Changing travel patterns in China and ‘carbon footprint’ implications for a domestic tourist destination

Mitigating tourism's emissions, in particular related to transportation is critical, to achieve the broader national emission reduction targets in developing countries. To gain a better understanding of the carbon emissions related to one of Chinese top destinations, and assess changes over time, this article analyses the travel patterns of both domestic and international visitors to Zhangjiajie, Hunan province. Two points in time are examined, namely 2009 and 2015. The results show that despite some contraction towards closer and shorter trips, the overall growth (a near doubling in arrivals) led to a substantial increase in carbon emissions. The increasing role of the private car and high-speed rail has been noted in particular. The average transportation carbon footprint of visitors to Zhangjiajie changed from 94.55 kg CO2 in 2009 to 82.97 kg in 2015 per trip, and 18.87 kg in 2009 to 16.46 kg in 2015 per visitor day.