A study found that India, the US and China together accounted for 60 percent of the increase in tourism emissions between 2009 and 2019, largely attributed to strong growth in population and travel demand.
China’s domestic tourism spending has grown by 17 percent per year over the past decade and global emissions have increased by 0.4 gigatons, followed by domestic tourism in the US (0.2 gigatons) and India (0.1 gigatons), the study published in the journal Nature said. communication, found.
Rising incomes, particularly among the “emerging economic powerhouses of China and India,” may also be a driving factor, researchers at the University of Queensland in Australia said in the study.
They tracked international and domestic travel for 175 countries over the period 2009-2019 and found that greenhouse gas emissions from tourism grew more than twice as fast as the rest of the world’s economy.
The carbon footprint from tourism was found to have increased from 3.7 gigatons to 5.2 gigatons – with the largest net emissions coming from aviation, utilities and private vehicles.
Rapid growth in travel demand has led to carbon emissions from tourism accounting for nine percent of the world’s total emissions, according to corresponding author Ya-Yen Sun, associate professor at the University of Queensland’s business school.
“Without immediate intervention in the global tourism industry, we estimate an annual increase in emissions of three to four percent, which means doubling every 20 years,” Sun said.
The author added that this trend does not comply with the Paris Agreement, according to which the region must cut its emissions by 10 percent each year.
“The key drivers behind rising emissions are slow technology improvements and rapid growth in demand,” Sun said.
“The net increase in tourism emissions has been unevenly distributed, with growth in domestic travel in three countries—the United States, China, and India—contributing the most to the absolute increase in emissions,” the authors wrote. If the world’s top 20 emitting destinations had kept their tourism growth rate at one percent per year from 2009 to 2019, about 0.38 gigatons of emissions could have been reduced in 2019—representing 7 percent of global tourism emissions, the team estimates. .