Carbon Emissions and Adventure Travel

Jan 3, 2010 | Filed Under Adventure Tourism and Social/Environmental Issues 

It’s not uncommon for people to question the utility of adventure tourism as a means of encouraging conservation, when it so often involves air travel, something we all know generates a significant amount of carbon emissions.  In this blog, we review a recent study entitled Carbon Footprint of Nations: A Global, Trade-Linked Analysis (Environmental Science and Technology, Vol. 43, No. 16, June 2009) and discuss its relationship to the tourism industry.

The authors believe that the complete value chain of consumption activities, from production through to consumption on a global basis, must be taken into account in order to get a true picture of a specific activity’s contribution to carbon emissions.

In general, food and services are more important in developing countries, while mobility and manufactured goods rise fast with income and dominate in rich countries. The carbon footprint  (CF) of shelter is largely determined by climate and energy use for heating and/or cooling. The share of manufacturing in the overall CF is around 10-15% for most OECD countries, around 10% for emerging countries, and distinctly lower for poor countries.

The service sector, of which tourism is part, globally contributes on average 10 – 20% of total CF. Much of this across all countries is related to public services, education and health. The relatively even share across nations was surprising to the authors because the share of services in total employment and GDP is often taken as indicators for the level of development of many economies. For many countries, the contribution of construction is around 10%. The high levels in China (25%) reflect a general trend of large investments as countries develop. The authors state that the study confirms that the indirect impacts in the supply chain are more important than direct impacts in the household in terms of contributions to global carbon emissions.

We find wide differences between countries’ carbon footprints once their trade-linked global carbon intensities are taken into account. This is helpful in an analysis of various sectors of the economy when developing an argument for investing in one sector over another to help reduce a country’s carbon footprint. Even taking into account air travel as a major component of tourism’s contribution to the global footprint and to tourism as an industry, it may well be that adventure travel operators’ small carbon footprint, even when combined with air travel’ may still be considerably smaller than those of many other industries and economic sectors.

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The study also confirms that there is a substantial degree of structural change in consumption patterns with rising income, with esults revealing that the carbon footprint by country is strongly correlated with per capita consumption expenditure. At high expenditure, mobility and the consumption of manufactured goods cause the largest GHG emissions. The authors expect the importance of these categories to increase with further increases in income as consumers around the world purchase more luxury items relative to necessities. Surprisingly, however, statistical analyses on the data show that the CF per unit expenditure is lower in rich countries than in poor countries, with carbon intensity decreasing over time with economic growth.

We believe that the results of this study have significant implications for the travel and tourism (“T&T”) industry, the quintessential global value chain, involving numerous industries, markets, and consumption patterns in and between countries. Since water as a scarce resource in many regions of the world is used in the manufacture of so many goods and is a key underpinning to the tourism industry, we believe that there will be increasing competition for the scarce resource.

In addition, it is our opinion that the tourism industry’s ability to create sustainable jobs while supporting the environment, including its water resources, will be critically important as competition amongst different industries and service sectors intensifies. The T&T industry must be able to present sensible and constructive mitigation and adaptation strategies to both the challenges of carbon emissions as well as water scarcity, not an insignificant challenge going forward.  – Henrietta deVeer

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