Tangible ways forward

To lower fossil fuel use, the use of the airplane must be reduced, as well as the distances we travel. This has been tested by implementing distance restrictions on global tourism flows. Peeters and Eijgelaar (2014b) found that the impacts of climate mitigation policies aimed at reducing tourism transport may be less severe than is often believed. Reducing tourism air transport affects poor and wealthy countries equally and a reduction in aviation may harm the development of some poor countries, but may also benefit others. On average, the impacts on LDCs were found to be ‘neutral’. Economic compensation of countries that lose from a reduction in tourism was deemed feasible in this study. For LDCs, the maximum loss was estimated approximately US$1.4 billion, which is 0.076 percent of the global direct GDP of tourism.

Therefore, it is plausible that the sector is able to compensate for such losses, for instance, by investing in less carbon-intensive (domestic, short-haul) tourism or by raising a small fee on long-haul travel to contribute to a special poverty alleviation fund, as suggested by Pentelow and Scott (2011). This could also be a meaningful contribution to sub-goals 13.1 („Strengthen resilience and adaptive capacity to climate-related hazards and natural disasters in all countries“) and 13.a (Implement the commitment undertaken by developed-country parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to a goal of mobilizing jointly $100 billion annually by 2020 from all sources to address the needs of developing countries in the context of meaningful mitigation actions and transparency on implementation and fully operationalize the Green Climate Fund through its capitalization as soon as possible.).

Scott, Gössling, Hall, and Peeters (2016) emphasize the need for tourism leadership (institutional capacity; sub-goal 13.3 „Improve education, awareness-raising and human and institutional capacity on climate change mitigation, adaptation, impact reduction and early warning“) in two key areas. The first one is the need to develop a tourism sector emission measurement and reporting system, so that progress on emission reduction is measurable. The second one is a strategic policy framework through which the sector could (technically and financially) achieve its emission reduction ambitions. We are currently a long way from seeing this kind of leadership.