Climate change and air pollution jointly creating nightmare for tourism industry

Abstract

The objective of the study is to examine the long-run and causal relationship between climate change (i.e., greenhouse gas emissions, hydrofluorocarbons, per fluorocarbons, and sulfur hexafluoride), air pollution (i.e., methane emissions, nitrous oxide emissions, and carbon dioxide emissions), and tourism development indicators (i.e., international tourism receipts, international tourism expenditures, natural resource depletion, and net forest depletion) in the World’s largest regions. The aggregate data is used for robust analysis in the South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and East Asia and the Pacific regions, over a period of 1975–2012. The results show that climatic factors and air pollution have a negative impact on tourism indicators in the form of deforestation and natural resource depletion. The impact is evident, as we have seen the systematic eroding of tourism industry, due to severe changes in climate and increasing strain of air pollution. There are several channels of cause–effect relationship between the climatic factors, air pollution, and tourism indicators in the World’s region. The study confirms the unidirectional, bidirectional, and causality independent relationship between climatic factors, air pollution, and tourism indicators in the World. It is conclusive that tourism industry is facing all time bigger challenges of reduce investment, less resources, and minor importance from the government agencies because of the two broad challenges, i.e., climate change and air pollution, putting them in a dismal state.