Chapter 13: Tourism and Travel: The Challenges of Net Zero

The international quest for net-zero emissions by mid-century has characterised both theoretical research and administrative activities in the last decades. Peeters and Dubois (2010) showed that overnight tourism represented a considerable share of CO₂ emissions. At the same time, the various possible scenarios of tourism development in the coming decades would not result in emission reductions without radical shifts in policies, strategies, and activities. This has led some to question whether decarbonising tourism would be achievable (Becken, 2019), given various important obstacles: e.g., the growth of the industry, institutionalisation of interests, flawed policies, and the geography of tourism. It is now estimated that tourism activities, directly and indirectly, contributed about 10% of global carbon emissions in pre-COVID-19 years, and they will probably return to similar, and possibly higher, values in the future (January–July 2024 international tourist arrivals were already back to 96% of pre-pandemic levels – see UN Tourism, 2024). Tourism-related transport alone is predicted to account for more than 5% of all global CO₂ emissions by 2030 (UN World Tourism Organization, 2019). At the international level, the Glasgow Declaration of 2021 for A commitment to a decade of tourism climate action is noteworthy as it aligns the sector with global commitments and proposes collaborative solutions. Moreover, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has issued a detailed roadmap to a 2050 net-zero future (Scott & Gössling, 2022a) that includes net-zero tourism as one of the important requirements to avoid a global temperature increase of 3°C. In order to reach this goal, all subsectors of the tourism industry will need to be involved, with a particular emphasis on international air travel and tourism growth projections.