Assessing tourism's global environmental impact 1900–2050

Abstract

This paper pioneers the assessment of tourism's total global resource use, including its fossil fuel consumption, associated CO₂ emissions, fresh water, land, and food use. As tourism is a dynamic growth system, characterized by rapidly increasing tourist numbers, understanding its past, current, and future contributions to global resource use is a central requirement for sustainable tourism assessments. The paper introduces the concept of resource use intensities (RUIs), which represent tourism's resource needs per unit of consumption (e.g. energy per guest night). Based on estimates of RUIs, a first assessment of tourism's global resource use and emissions is provided for the period 1900–2050, utilizing the Peeters Global Tourism Transport Model. Results indicate that the current (2010) global tourism system may require c.16,700 PJ of energy, 138 km³ of fresh water, 62,000 km² of land, and 39.4 Mt of food, also causing emissions of 1.12 Gt CO₂. Despite efforts to implement more sustainable forms of tourism, analysis indicates that tourism's overall resource consumption may grow by between 92% (water) and 189% (land use) in the period 2010–2050. To maintain the global tourism system consequently requires rapidly growing resource inputs, while the system is simultaneously becoming increasingly vulnerable to disruptions in resource flows.

评估旅游业在1900至2050年间对全球环境的影响

本文开辟了旅游业全球总资源使用的评估，包括其化石燃料的消耗，相关的二氧化碳排放量，淡水，土地和食品使用。由于旅游业是一个动态的成长系统，其特点是快速增长的游客数量，了解它的过去、现在和未来对全球资源利用的贡献是可持续旅游评估的中心要求。本文介绍了资源的使用强度（RUIS），它代表每单位消费的旅游资源需求（例如：每夜每客人所消费的能源）。基于RUIS的测算，利用彼得斯全球旅游交通模式，第一个1900至2050年旅游业全球资源的使用和排放的评估产生了。结果显示，目前（2010年）全球旅游系统可能需要c.16, 700 PJ的能源，138立方公里的淡水， 62000平方公里的土地和39.4万吨粮食，同时会造成了1.12亿吨的二氧化碳排放量。尽管努力实现旅游业更可持续的发展形式，分析表明，旅游业的整体资源消耗在2010-2050年期间可能在水方面增长92％，在土地使用方面增长189％。为了保持全球旅游系统不断完善需要迅速增长的资源投入，同时该系统会同时变得越来越容易受到资源流动中断的威胁。

Keywords:

• energy
• food
• fresh water
• greenhouse gas emissions
• land use
• scenarios
• tourism

关键词:

• 环境影响评估
• 大众旅游
• 可持续旅游
• 环境指标
• 天气变化
• 情景分析

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09669582.2015.1008500).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stefan Gössling

Stefan Gössling is a professor at the School of Business and Economics at Linnaeus University, Kalmar, and at the Department of Service Management, Lund University, both in Sweden. He is also the research co-ordinator at the Western Norway Research Institute (Sustainable Tourism). He studied geography and biology, and holds a PhD in human ecology from Lund University. Stefan has worked with aspects of sustainable tourism since 1994, focusing primarily on transport, mobilities, energy, and water.

Paul Peeters

Paul Peeters is an associate professor specialised in the impacts of tourism on the environment and specifically on climate change. His publications cover a wide range of topics including global and regional tourism and climate scenarios, system dynamic approaches to tourism, tourism transport mode choice and modal shift, policy-making and transport technological developments. He is responsible for the NHTV Centre for Sustainable Tourism & Transport (www.cstt.nl) and a group of six researchers at NHTV Breda University of Applied Sciences, The Netherlands.