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Abstract
This paper develops and explains an input–output model to quantify the carbon footprint linked to residents' and visitors' tourist consumption in the Spanish economy between 1995 and 2007, thus offering a rare longitudinal review of a national carbon footprint. Two measures are calculated: a domestic one similar to the producer responsibility criterion and a total measure that includes imported intermediate and final goods, similar to the consumer responsibility measure. The important role of tourism in Spain explains why its domestic carbon footprint represented 10.6% of total CO2 emissions in 2007. Visiting tourists represented 47% of this figure, households 36%, business tourism represented 14% and public administration expenditures 3%. By industry, transport (26%) was positioned as the highest emitter in 2007, with hotels and restaurants the second (21%) (benefitting indirectly from energy and environmental efficiency improvements over the period). The Spanish reliance on imported oil products and the growing importance of foreign-based air services has caused the total carbon footprint of tourism to increase by more than 100%. Therefore, climate change mitigation plans must include imports, and action must take place through the whole global production chain and in the transport sector, particularly air transport. Future mitigation policies are discussed.
量化西班牙旅游业的碳排放量：居民和游客的贡献
本文发展并解释了投入产出模型来量化碳排放量与居民和游客的旅游消费在1995年至2007年间的西班牙经济，从而提供一个全国性碳排放量的一种罕见的纵向审查。其中两项措施被评估：国内措施类似生产者责任标准，而全面措施包括进口的中间和最终产品，与消费者责任措施类似。旅游业在西班牙的重要作用解释了为什么2007年国内碳排放量占总二氧化碳排放量的10.6％。旅客代表了这个数字的47％，农户占36％，商务旅游占14％，公共行政管理支出的占3％。按行业划分，在2007年交通运输（26％）贡献量最高，第二位是旅馆和餐馆（21％），（能源和环境效率的提高在此期间间接受益）。同时西班牙对进口石油产品的依赖和国外基于航空服务的日益增长的重要性已经引起旅游业的碳排放总量超过100％增长。因此，减缓气候变化的计划必须包括进口和必须包含整个全球生产链和运输部门的行动，尤其是航空运输。同时对未来的减排政策进行了讨论。
Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge Bernard Lane and two anonymous referees for their comments and editing suggestions that greatly improved the paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. It is outside the scope of this analysis to evaluate the ratio of tourism activities (e.g. those derived from tourist trips by families using their private vehicles) to the total emissions by households. To calculate the emissions that are linked to tourist consumption, we would need to estimate these direct emissions in situ (Lundie, Dwyer, & Forsyth, Citation2007).
2. The total ecological footprint of the tourism industry is also relevant; in Spain, this impact translates into considerable urban growth on the Mediterranean coast, and land/environmental resources used by hotels and second homes and associated infrastructure such as highways, and airports. To measure the entire environmental impact of tourism, we would also have to include the investment linked to tourism, which is recognised by the UNWTO (Citation2008); however, these factors are outside this paper's scope.
3. More recent papers on this topic evaluate the option of establishing a shared responsibility criterion between producers, consumers and/or countries (Cadarso et al., Citation2012; Peters, Citation2008).
4. Our calculation is more comprehensive than the calculation by the UNWTO (Citation2008) for the world economy in 2005, which only considers direct emissions linked to energy consumption for tourist activities. These emissions are classified into transport, accommodation and other activities. Moreover, our estimation methodology is also different (see the second section on environmental effects of tourism for an explanation of this point).
5. Up to our knowledge, this is the only study on the environmental impact from tourism using Spanish input–output data.
6. Dwyer et al. (Citation2010) estimate the carbon footprint of the Australian tourism industry for 2003–2004. They consider emissions in two groups of sectors: tourism-characteristic emissions and tourism-connected emissions, as defined by the Australian TSAs. Moreover, they introduce a double perspective by considering a “production approach” and an “expenditure approach”, which are defined by the authors. These respective approaches account for the emissions generated by the tourism industry and the emissions that are linked to expenditures incurred by tourists.
7. Nevertheless, there is a difference between the Kyoto and IPCC territorial criterion and the production-based criterion used by CSEAs, as indicated by these authors. The second criterion treats international transport differently, and it considers emissions from international tourism to be allocated based on where individual tourists are resident rather than their destinations; furthermore, the first criterion does not include bunkers and the second one does not incorporate tourist consumption. These authors find that the producer emissions were higher than the domestic (territorial) emissions for the UK between 1990 and 2009, and the difference grew by 75% in that period.
8. See, for instance, Munksgaard and Pedersen (Citation2001), Sánchez-Chóliz and Duarte (Citation2004), Peters and Hertwich (Citation2006) or Cadarso et al. (Citation2012).
9. In the last case, the expenditure corresponds to the services by travel agencies and the non-market tourist services of public administrations.
10. Where subscript h stands for households, v for visiting tourists, PA for Public Administrations and b for business tourism.
11. This type of model is methodology choice 2 proposed in the TSAs by the INE: to build a broadened tourist demand to include business trips, but consequently changing the aggregate data in national accounts (INE, Citation2002).
12. To fully account for the tourist producer's responsibility, we should include not only emissions from tourist-related consumption goods, but also emissions linked to the capital goods bought by the tourism industry. This type of investment is required to provide tourism services: building hotels, airports, roads, etc. In this paper, we do not calculate the emissions from investment by the tourism industry; instead, we focus on emissions from tourist consumption.
13. This assumption is justified if we think that the Spanish or foreign tourists consistently find the same share of imports in shops as households at home.
14. As we mentioned in “Methodology” section, only the use of a full MRIO approach can assess if the different environmental efficiency of imported products in comparison to the corresponding domestic products involves an increase or a reduction of global emissions.
15. The full calculation of visitors’ carbon footprint should include the emissions embodied in the expenditure of foreign tourists in the country of origin (not covered by Spanish firms). However, we omit this point, as it is impossible to obtain this information.
16. As tourist-related exports and visitors’ touristic consumption take place mainly within the Spanish borders, the territorial difference between tourism-related producers’ and consumers’ responsibilities is only due to imports and does not include exports, which is contrary to the usual definition of these responsibilities.
17. Another possible calculation, which is valid if we are not interested in isolating the contribution of imports in EquationEquation (6)(6) , is
.
18. By industry, the tourist consumption eco-efficiency measure (π*) is equal to the economy's multiplier (ϵ*) for those industries where there is tourist consumption. Our measure has the advantage of providing a global efficiency measure of tourist consumption, for the four tourist agents, and allows us to analyse their evolution.
19. See Filimonau et al. (Citation2011) for discussion of input–output schemes’ advantages and disadvantages.
20. Since our aim is to calculate the carbon footprint of tourism in Spain, we seek a “country approach” (Gössling, Citation2013) in the allocation of air transport emissions.
21. See Patterson and McDonald (Citation2004) for an alternative estimation procedure.
22. The data come from different sources: the passengers and pkm of local companies as well as the total passengers come from the INE; inbound tourists by airports come from the Frontur database (CitationMITYC, different years); and the emissions pkm come from the UNWTO (Citation2008) and Gössling (Citation2013). Moreover, we need to make several restrictive assumptions due to the lack of data: the kilometre linked to the international flights of indigenous companies are the same as those linked to foreign companies, there is no efficiency variation through time in emissions pkm of different aircrafts and we take the same mean of emissions pkm for international flights regardless of the residence of the airline.
23. Taking 0.085 kg/pkm reduces the underestimation range by nearly half to 95%–116%.
24. The methodological changes introduced by the INE reduce the data's comparability for 1995 in relation to both input–output data and Tourism Satellite Accounts. For 2007, we maintain the input–output structure (multipliers) of 2005. It is important to note the 2005 base change of CSEAs in relation to 2003, as the number of industries with detailed information has changed, which may introduce some uncertainties into the results.
25. In 2007, cheap airlines represented nearly 40% of all air transport arrivals, which was up from 9% in 2001, and these airlines’ market share has increased by 6% since 2003 at the expense of the traditional air companies (Institute of Touristic Studies, IET, Industry, Tourism and Trade Ministry, MITYC in Spanish, MITYC, Citation2007).
26. We must note that we are also underestimating the importance of land transport for households, as the data do not allow us to include the domestic use of private vehicles for tourism. However, for business and PA tourism the importance of land transport with respect to emissions is 17% and 54%, respectively, in 2007.
27. It must be highlighted that cars’ transport emission factor was 0.133 kg/pkm in 2005, which is slightly above the corresponding air factor, although the total emissions in car transport increased by 47.4% and air transport's emissions increased by 52.4%.
28. Nevertheless, we must take into account the base change in the CSEAs data from 2003 to 2005. The reduction in direct emissions by hotels from 3.134 ktCO2 in 2003 to 505 in 2005 could be partly due to this statistical problem.
29. These authors find that Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand show important leakages from imports, employee remunerations, repatriations and interest paid to the rest of the world from loans.
30. These calculations are based on tourism's labor footprint and the value added footprint, which are computed by changing the emission coefficient in expressions 6 and 7 to the employment and value added coefficients, respectively.
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Notes on contributors
María-Ángeles Cadarso
Maria Ángeles Cadarso is a lecturer at the Department of Economics and Finance in the University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain. She has interests in international trade, sustainability and environmental economic analysis through the use of input–output methodologies. She is a co-director of the Global Energy and Environmental Economic Analysis Research Group (GEAR).
Nuria Gómez
Nuria Gómez is an associate professor at the Department of Economics and Finance, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Spain. She has published several papers on international trade and environmental economics using input–output techniques. She is a member of the GEAR research group.
Luis-Antonio López
Luis-Antonio López is an associate professor at the Department of Economics and Finance, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain. His research interests include energy and environmental economics analysis using input–output methodologies, with special emphasis on the effects of international trade and environment. He is a co-director of the GEAR research group.
María-Ángeles Tobarra
Maria-Ángeles Tobarra is an associate professor at the Department of Economics and Finance, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha (Spain). Her research deals with environmental economics, input–output models, energy demand and offshoring.
Jorge-Enrique Zafrilla
Jorge-Enrique Zafrilla is an assistant professor in the Department of Economics and Finance in the University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain, and a member of the GEAR research group. His research interests include energy and environmental economics analysis through the use of input–output methodologies.