Impact of Air Transport Emissions on Tourism-A Pro-Active Initiative

Air transport facilitates integration into the global economy and provides vital connectivity on a national, regional, and international scale. It helps generate trade, promote tourism, and create employment opportunities. Tourism has grown continuously over the past few decades and now represents 10% of global employment and 10% of global gross domestic product (GDP). With the number of domestic and international arrivals forecast to reach 15.6 billion and 1.8 billion by 2030 respectively, tourism is expected to continue generating significant benefits in terms of both socioeconomic development and job creation worldwide. At the same time, this will have an environmental impact and one of the main challenges facing the tourism sector today is the need to decouple its projected growth from the use of resources and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. At the same time, however, greenhouse gas emissions linked to tourism-related transport are also rising, challenging the tourism sector’s ambition to meet the targets of the Paris Agreement. Tourism is under significant threat from the effects of climate change, especially from extreme weather events that can lead to increasing insurance costs and safety concerns, as well as from water shortages, the loss of biodiversity and damage to assets and attractions at destinations. This paper works on tourism demand across the different global regions on the planet and also presents the expected transport-related CO₂ emissions of the tourism sector against the current ambition scenario for the decarbonisation of transport. This study may guide the policy-makers in formulating CO2 emissions and tourism by initiating development policies for sustainable growth for long periods.