The national tourism carbon emission inventory: its importance, applications and allocation frameworks

Abstract

A credible national tourism emission inventory is a key to the effective carbon management of tourism activities. Currently, there are no guidelines that define the scope and boundaries for evaluating national tourism emissions and great variations exist in research methodologies, leading to confusion and misuse of these measures. This study compares four accounting frameworks, the Production Accounting Principle (PAP), the Kyoto Protocol Framework (KPF), the Consumption Accounting Principle (CAP) and the Tourism Satellite Account Principle (TSAP), for their concepts, calculations, attributions of responsibility and applications in serving different carbon management purposes. We argue that the TSAP inventory is the best framework to calibrate the full-scale environmental externality concerning internal tourism consumption; the PAP inventory is a comprehensive measure for monitoring territorial emissions and forms a base to apply abatement policies toward domestic producers, and the TSAP, PAP and CAP are all valid indicators that monitor the trade-off between economic output and GHGs. A case study of Taiwan is presented.

Keywords:

• Climate change
• tourism carbon emissions
• Tourism Satellite Account Principle (TSAP)
• Production Accounting Principle
• Consumption Accounting Principle
• Kyoto Protocol Framework

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 GVC describes the full range of activities that firms require from multiple suppliers across different geographic areas to deliver a product or service (UNEP, 2013).

2 The country of consumption can be (1) the country of departure where consumers demand services related to the local travel agency or regional transportation to airport, (2) the country of destination for services in transportation, lodging, dining, recreational service, shopping, and nature and cultural tourism resources, and (3) the country of transfer point where food, souvenirs and transportation are purchased.

3 The other principle, income-based accounting principle (IAP), calculates the downstream emissions associated with products and services. This is computed by direct emissions plus emissions associated with payments of exports and subtracts the emissions associated with payments for imports where the responsibility rests on the sellers of primary inputs (workers and investors) (Lenzen & Murray, 2010; Marques et al., 2012). Because tourism is final-demand driven, PAP and CAP are able to provide a better framework for assigning carbon responsibility.

4 Internal tourism consists of domestic and inbound tourism.

5 The official definition is “the right or privilege, in respect to scheduled international air services, granted by one State to another State to put down and to take on, in the territory of the first State, traffic coming from or destined to a third State (also known as a ‘Fifth Freedom Right’)” (ICAO, 2004, pp. 4.1–8).

6 (1) clothes or accessories; (2) jewelry or jade; (3) souvenirs or handicraft products; (4) cosmetics or perfumes; (5) featured food or special products; (6) tobacco or alcohol; (7) Chinese herbal medicine or health food; (8) Computers, Communications and Consumer Electronics (3C) or electric appliances; (9) tea; (10) other.

7 The emission data (CO₂) in WIOD are only available for year 2009 at the time of the writing, and we calculated the 2009 emission coefficient, defined as tons CO₂/1000 US dollars, for a total of 1,435 sectors for 41 countries in the WIOD database. Without substantial technological changes, the emission coefficient would remain stable over time, allowing us to use the 2009 coefficients to approximate the 2011 emission intensity per unit spending.

8 The TSAP measure in this paper (27.1 Mt) is slightly larger than the TSAP figure (26.3 Mt) reported by Sun (2014). The difference is a result of multipliers because the current paper employs the MREEIO model, while Sun (2014) used a single-country EEIO model and the “domestic technology assumption” to calculate imported emissions.

9 Please note that the shipping emissions from transporting goods from foreign sites to the domestic region should also be considered.

Additional information

Funding

Financial support from the Taiwan Ministry of Science and Technology under MOST 105-2410-H-006 -055 -MY3 is gratefully acknowledged.

Notes on contributors

Ya-Yen Sun

Dr. Ya-Yen Sun is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Queensland, Australia. Ya-Yen’s research area is on the economic and environmental impacts of tourism consumption and analyzing how these have influenced the local society based on different policy formulations. She has undertaken research on (1) the tourism carbon footprint, (2) tourism contribution in employment and gross domestic product (GDP), (3) methodology improvements and modeling on tourism impacts and (4) carrying capacity of protected areas with respect to visitors.

Manfred Lenzen

Manfred Lenzen is Professor of Sustainability Research at Integrated Sustainability Analysis (ISA) in the School of Physics at the University of Sydney. Manfred has a PhD in Nuclear Physics and 15 years of experience in renewable energy technologies. He has undertaken extensive experimental research on passive solar architecture. He is an international leader in economic Input-Output Analysis and Life-Cycle Assessment, is Associate Editor for the Journal of Industrial Ecology and is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Economic Systems Research. He has contributed major methodological advances as well as numerous applications, in particular on embodied energy and greenhouse gas emissions.

Bi-Jen Liu

Ms Bi-Jen Liu received her master degree from the Department of Transportation & Communication Management Science, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan. She is interested in addressing the tourism environmental issues using the multi-regional environmentally extended input-output models.