Calculating tourism's carbon footprint: measuring the impact of investments

Progress and Prospects for Tourism Footprint Research

“…In addition, tourism accommodations and tourism catering are important components of the tourism footprint, accounting for 3-21% and 2-16% of the total TCF, respectively. Furthermore, traveling by air is a dominant and increasing factor in the energy consumption and CO 2 emissions of tourism transportation [17,20,22,74], especially for isolated or island-based destinations, where tourists overwhelmingly arrive by air [18,20,48]. …”

“…Combining the two methods can effectively provide more comprehensive and accurate results, as observed in tourism footprint calculations that have been performed in New Zealand [18], Australia [20] and Switzerland [52] (Table 1). In addition, Cadarso et al [22], Zhong et al [25], and Zhou et al [58] combined IO analysis with an LCA to build the IO-LCA joint model, which reduces truncation errors and superpositions and simplifies the calculation process. Overall, comprehensive methods will make tourism footprint results more dependable and less contestable.…”

“…Against this background, TCF analysis focuses on environmental issues caused by large-scale tourism, particularly its energy consumption and CO 2 emissions (defined as the amount of CO 2-eq emissions caused directly and indirectly by tourism activity), which have been widely researched at various scales, such as analyses for the countries of New Zealand [18], Sweden [19], Australia [20], Spain [21,22], Iceland [23], and China [24][25][26]; the regions of Taiwan [27][28][29], Wales [30], and Poole [31]; and even the scenic locations of the Penghu Islands [32] and Huangshan National Park [33]. TCF analysis excels at assessing the impact of tourism greenhouse gas emissions on climate change and identifying the contribution of tourism carbon emissions to climate change at the global scale, which has become a key research field.…”

“…Few longitudinal studies have examined the tourism footprint based on different regions and time series analyses, although the analyses by Cadarso et al [22], Sharp et al [23], Sun [29] and Tang et al [47] are based on a time series. This deficit means that we cannot effectively understand the dynamic change trend in the tourism footprint and the impact of tourism activities on the environment across time dimensions.…”

Greenhouse Gas Emissions of Tourism-Based Leisure Farms in Taiwan

“…However, the carbon footprint embodied in the tourism industry includes infrastructure construction, hotel building construction, catering services, transportation etc., which leads to an underestimation of the tourism sector's environmental responsibility [2][3][4]. There is obvious economic growth for those countries that have endeavored in tourism development [5][6][7][8].…”