Decarbonising tourism: mission impossible?

Abstract

The tourism industry collectively seeks to portray itself as being proactive in embracing climate action, but is the sector doing enough to decarbonise to the extent agreed on in the Paris Agreement? This paper presents a constructive critique of the key mechanisms that presently define the global travel and tourism industry’s attempts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Six challenges are identified and each constitutes a major hurdle to rapid and substantial progress. These are: tourism’s embeddedness in the prevailing growth paradigm, the institutionalisation of interests, the nature of policy making, the inadequacy of incremental improvements, the focus on technological efficiency instead of (behavioural) conservation, and the global distribution of tourism. The paper concludes by suggesting that only systemic changes at a large scale will be sufficient to break or disrupt existing arrangements and routines. Tourism academics should contribute to identifying and helping to implement solutions, but this will require much greater collaboration with the industry and government, as well as with researchers from a broad range of disciplines.