Drivers of global tourism carbon emissions

Abstract

Tourism has a critical role to play in global carbon emissions pathway. This study estimates the global tourism carbon footprint and identifies the key drivers using environmentally extended input-output modelling. The results indicate that global tourism emissions grew 3.5% p.a. between 2009-2019, double that of the worldwide economy, reaching 5.2 Gt CO₂-e or 8.8% of total global GHG emissions in 2019. The primary drivers of emissions growth are slow technology efficiency gains (0.3% p.a.) combined with sustained high growth in tourism demand (3.8% p.a. in constant 2009 prices). Tourism emissions are associated with alarming distributional inequalities. Under both destination- and resident-based accounting, the twenty highest-emitting countries contribute three-quarters of the global footprint. The disparity in per-capita tourism emissions between high- and low-income nations now exceeds two orders of magnitude. National tourism decarbonisation strategies will require demand volume thresholds to be defined to align global tourism with the Paris Agreement.

Fig. 1. Tourism carbon footprints according to residence-based accounting (RBA) and destination-based accounting (DBA).

RBA measures emissions resulting from residents’ domestic and outbound travel, while DBA measures emissions from domestic and inbound tourism activities occurring within a country. The domestic travel footprint is represented in grey, the inbound tourism footprint in green, and the outbound tourism footprint in blue.

Fig. 2. Decomposition result of the tourism carbon footprints, 2009-2019.

Tourism carbon footprints increased from 3.7 GtCO₂-e to 5.2 Gt from 2009 to 2019. The net changes, 1.5 Gt CO₂-e, were broken down into five components to highlight relative contribution of individual factors.

Fig. 3. Decomposition result for the top 10 RBA countries, 2009–2019.

Changes in tourism carbon footprints can be attributed to production factors: technology (blue) and supply chain (red) and consumer factors: per capita expenditure (yellow), population (purple), and private vehicle use (green). Negative values indicate the extent to which emissions are reduced through a particular factor, ceteris paribus. Conversely, positive values demonstrate how that particular factor contributes to an increase in emissions.

Fig. 4. Distribution of per-capita outbound travel emissions (left) and the adjusted per capita outbound travel emissions by GDP (right), 2019.

Average per-capita outbound travel emissions are strongly correlated with per-capita GDP. However, once adjusted for the proportion of the population able to afford international travel, per-capita outbound travel emissions show no differences across income levels of countries. The bubbles represent the size of each country’s GDP.