To Travel or Not to Travel? Both Have Implications for Sustainable Tourism

Abstract

The increasing concern over tourism's greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and its subsequent impact on climate change has led some to recommend strict measures to reduce the volume of travel. While the reduction of tourism's GHG emissions is an essential piece of tourism's sustainability, there has been little discussion of the implications that reducing travel could have on a destination's triple bottom line (ecological, sociocultural, and economic sustainability). Much of the sustainable tourism literature has historically focused on maximizing tourism's benefits to residents' quality of life, the environment, cultural heritage, and the economy, but these traditional metrics have been largely removed from the recent discussion on tourism and climate change. This article proposes a conceptual model that incorporates the traditional metrics of sustainability with the net amount of GHG emitted to help determine whether travel has a net positive or negative impact. While the model is entirely theoretical, it depicts sustainable tourism as not solely a function of GHG emissions, but a function of maximizing tourism's positive impacts (handprint) within destinations while minimizing its GHG emissions (footprint). The article concludes by demonstrating how the framework can be applied to increase tourism's sustainability within destinations as well as globally.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to acknowledge Dr. Muzaffer Uysal, Dr. Bruce Hull, Dr. Paul Angermeier, Dr. Melissa Baker, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments in the development of this article.