Doing all we can? Destination management organizations' net-zero pledges and their decarbonization plans

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Guix, Mireia
Babakhani, Nazila
Sun, Ya-Yen
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2024
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Abstract

Strong leadership by destination management organizations (DMOs) is urgently needed to foster significant emissions reductions at the macro-level. With an increasing number of DMOs pledging to the Tourism Declares initiative and the Glasgow Declaration, achieving net-zero becomes a responsibility. This study (1) proposes nine macro-level decarbonization factors as a framework for DMOs to strategize their climate actions, and (2) examines whether DMOs’ pledges and plans address critical decarbonization factors. It is found that most DMOs do not fully utilize all effective factors in their climate strategies. More than half of the DMOs focus on improving the energy intensity of tourism businesses and inspiring tourists toward green service, factors that, alone, are insufficient. We identify two key initiatives on which DMOs can have the most influence, yet they are rarely considered: optimizing the marketing mix for low-emission groups and setting a growth threshold. We conclude with recommendations on how they might improve their commitments for real progress toward the net-zero transition.

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Journal of Sustainable Tourism

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© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.

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This publication has been entered in Griffith Research Online as an advance online version.

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Guix, M; Babakhani, N; Sun, Y-Y, Doing all we can? Destination management organizations' net-zero pledges and their decarbonization plans, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 2024

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