The industry is failing to make itself greener
Tv's on seat backs in a plane.
Photograph: Magnum
Tourists have been getting a lot of flak recently. Venice has started charging €5 ($5.30) for day-trippers and limits the size of tour groups. Rome is considering a €2 fee to see the Trevi fountain. New Zealand has upped fees for visitors. A new study, published this week in Nature Communications, is not going to help the tourists’ cause. Researchers, led by Ya-Yen Sun at the University of Queensland, in Australia, found that between 2009 and the start of the covid-19 pandemic in 2020, global emissions from tourism grew by an average of 3.5% a year, double the rate of emissions in general. In 2019 tourism led to 5.2 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide—almost 9% of the world’s total. Of that, aviation accounted for the bulk (52%) of direct emissions. Utilities, such as the electricity used in accommodation, were the main cause (34%) of the indirect ones.