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 driver (34%) of the indirect carbon emissions.
In the decade studied, demand for tourism rose at a steady 3.8% per year.Many other industries have managed to decouple their growth from their emissions but tourism’s “carbon intensity”—the amount of emissions produced for every dollar spent—in 2019 was 30% higher than the global economy’s average, and four times greater than for the services sector as a whole. And that is despite international attempts to reduce tourism’s environmental harm. “There are so many initiatives, investments, declarations,” says Dr Sun. “But there’s no sign of a slowdown in terms of emissions growth.”
That failure, in part, seems to stem from lobbying by airlines. Schemes meant to make them greener tend to be toothless: carriers can sometimes sidestep them entirely by using small amounts of sustainable fuel. Moreover, tourists typically behave in a more emissions-intensive way than at home, eating out, shopping and living the high life. Because their emissions come from so many sources, it is hard for countries to know how to account for it all.
Dr Sun also found that tourism, and its emissions, are not distributed evenly. The 20 countries with the most tourism emissions per person were responsible for three-quarters of the global footprint, with rich countries unsurprisingly having far greater per-head emissions from outbound tourism than poorer ones. The absolute rise in emissions was driven predominantly by domestic travel within just three countries: America, China and India.
All this leads the researchers to argue that—as well as tightening regulation for aviation—governments must do a better job of adding up the emissions that tourists generate, and setting limits for the numbers they allow in. That could be unpopular with places that are keen to attract travellers who want to spend money (though the recent moves by destinations such as Venice suggest otherwise).
But policymakers can help in other ways, too: the best way to shrink tourism’s footprint is to speed up the transition to renewable-energy sources, so those activities lead to as few emissions as possible.
