As the remaining carbon budget to limit global warming to 1.5°C dwindles – expected to run out in just 6 years – a new Nature Communications study has found that greenhouse gas emissions from tourism have been growing faster than global emissions.
The new analysis, which considered data for international and domestic travel in 175 countries, found that tourism alone produces 8.8% of the world’s total emissions.
Aviation, utilities and private vehicle use for travel are the major contributors of high growth tourism emissions.
“Without urgent interventions in the global tourism industry, we anticipate annual increases in emissions of 3-4% meaning they will double every 20 years,” says Ya-Yen Sun, first author of the study from the University of Queensland, Australia.
“This does not comply with the Paris Agreement which requires the sector to reduce its emissions by more than 10% annually.
“The major drivers behind the increasing emissions are slow technology improvements and a rapid growth in demand.”
Sun and collaborators found that tourism’s global carbon footprint increased from 3.7 gigatonnes (Gt) in 2019 to 5.2Gt in 2019. Every dollar earned in tourism in 2019 generated 1.02kg of greenhouse gas emissions.
The report found that the COVID-19 pandemic was the only event that drastically reduced tourism’s carbon footprint, producing a smaller environmental impact than the base year 2009.
However, they say that global tourism demand has seen a swift resurgence, signalling a return to the high emissions levels of 2019.
“A simple universal reduction of tourism volume across countries (e.g., all countries reduce their tourism demand by 5%) however is not an ideal approach as this procedure does not represent a fair and just mitigation approach,” the authors write in the study.
The report found that responsibility for tourism emissions was not shared equally across the globe. Just 20 countries – predominantly highly developed with large populations – contributed 3.9Gt or about 3/4 of the total tourism footprint.
Of these, the US, China, and India were the worst offenders. They were responsible for 60% of the total increase in tourism emissions across the study period, mainly due to growth in domestic travel.
The authors emphasise that controls in tourism demand must consider countries’ historical and cumulative tourism emissions, their financial and technical capacities to mitigate emissions, as well as responsibilities to support low-income and small island economies.
“The biggest carbon challenge in tourism is air travel,” says Sun.
“Reducing long-haul flights is one of the recommendations we’ve put forward to help the industry lower its emissions, along with targeted measures such as carbon dioxide taxes, carbon budgets, and alternative fuel obligations.
“Cutting back on marketing long-haul travel and identifying a national growth threshold would also help rein in the rapid expansion of emissions.”
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