The double-edged sword of wine tourism: the economic and environmental impacts of wine tourism in Australia

Abstract

With more than 40 million tourists visiting wineries each year, wine tourism is increasingly seen as a business strategy that provides economic benefits not only for the wine industry but also for the surrounding region. These economic benefits come with the environmental cost of increasing carbon emissions. This important environmental issue, however, has received very limited attention in existing wine tourism policies, wine industry carbon footprint studies, and wine industry sustainability frameworks. In this study, we provide the first-ever macro-level carbon emission profile for wine tourism activities in Australia. Using environmentally extended input-output modelling, we offer a comprehensive picture of the carbon footprint of this growing market, showing that tourism is responsible for more than one-third of the wine industry’s carbon footprint. We also provide a tradeoff analysis that discusses the amount of emissions that are produced to earn one-dollar of revenue via wine tourism. The results demonstrate that the failure to take the carbon costs of wine tourism into account may encourage the pursuit of an unlimited growth approach to wine tourism, which will increase greenhouse gas emissions and contribute to the effects of climate change that are already being felt in the wine sector.

Keywords:

• Wine tourism
• carbon emissions
• environmentally extended input-output analysis
• Australia
• sustainability

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 These 15 categories include “domestic airfares, international airfares, package tours, organised tours, rental vehicles, petrol, taxi & local public transport, long distance public transport, accommodation, food and drink, shopping, entertainment, gambling, education, other expenditure, motor vehicle, registration fees, and phone, fax & postage”.

2 Tourism Research Australia discontinued the collection of data relating to wine tourism in 2016.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ya-Yen Sun

Ya-Yen Sun is a senior lecturer at the University of Queensland, Australia. Her interest is to profile, identify and decompose factors that drive tourism economic impacts and tourism environmental impacts at the macro level.

Donald Drakeman

Donald Drakeman is a Professor at the University of Notre Dame, United States. His current research focuses on the use of historical materials in constitutional and statutory interpretation, including various topics in contemporary originalism, as well as wine tourism.