Recently, tourists have received a lot of firepower. Venice has started charging 5 euros (USD 5.30) for day trips and restricted tours. Rome is considering paying 2 euros to visit the Trevi Fountain. New Zealand has raised fees to tourists.
A new study published this week in Natural Communication will not help tourists’ careers. Researchers led by Ya-yen Sun, University of Queensland, Australia, found that during the 2009-2020 Covid-19 pandemic, global emissions from tourism increased by an average of 3.5% annually, with the rate doubling general emissions.
In 2019, the tourism industry reached 5.2 Gigatonnes CO2, accounting for almost 9% of the global total. Among them, aviation accounts for the majority of direct emissions (52%). Utilities (such as electricity used for accommodation) are the main drivers of indirect carbon emissions (34%).
During the decade of research, demand for tourism has steadily increased by 3.8% per year. Other industries have managed to get their emissions out of growth, but the “carbon intensity” of tourism (emissions generated per dollar spent) in 2019 was 30% higher than the global economy average, compared with the The entire service department is four times higher. Despite international efforts to reduce environmental hazards in tourism, this is not the case. “There are a lot of initiatives, investments, statements,” Dr. Sun said. “But there is no sign of a slowdown in emission growth.”
This failure seems to be partly due to airline lobbying. Solutions designed to make them green are often toothless: carriers can sometimes avoid them completely using a small amount of sustainable fuel. Additionally, visitors often behave in a more intensive way than eating, shopping and living a high life at home. Since their emissions come from many sources, it is difficult for the country to know how to think about it all.
Dr. Sun also found that tourism and its emissions were not evenly distributed. The 20 countries with the highest emissions per person are responsible for three-quarters of the global footprint, and there is no doubt that the man-made emissions in wealthy countries are much greater than export tourism. The absolute growth in emissions is driven primarily by domestic travel in three countries: the United States, China and India.
All of this leads researchers to argue that, as well as strengthening regulation of aviation, governments must do better, can increase emissions generated by tourists and set limits for the numbers they allow. Passionate about attracting travelers who want to spend money (although the latest moves for destinations like Venice are another).
But policy makers can help in other ways: The best way to narrow the tourism footprint is to speed up the transition to renewable energy, so these activities will lead to as few emissions as possible.
