Measuring the carbon footprint of inbound tourism at a destination level

Abstract

Destination’s dependency on aviation leads to inbound tourists producing higher levels of emissions than domestic tourists. This paper aimed to measure the first baseline carbon footprint of inbound tourism at a popular island destination, without the Tourism Satellite Accounts. The environmentally extended input-output life-cycle analysis is the most favourable approach to measure tourism emissions. However, this approach cannot be applied internationally due to the lack of tourism data. Therefore, this study implemented an integrated bottom-up approach to successfully measure inbound tourism emissions. According to this study, inbound tourism to Ireland generates 11.78 MtCO2eq, this is a conservative estimate due to the assumptions made to overcome the data limitations. Nevertheless, this study contributes to the increasing body of knowledge on tourism emissions as it establishes Ireland’s first baseline carbon footprint of inbound tourism and demonstrates the need to upskill the tourism industry to actively measure, monitor and manage tourism decarbonisation.