Climate Change and Tourism - UNEP - Division of Technology ...

UNWTO, 9 July 2008
Mitigation Policies and Measures
There is still a lot of confusion among tourists about what carbon offsetting is, 732 and there is also
evidence that particularly hypermobile travellers, who account for the major share of the distances
travelled and emissions caused, are not ready to support voluntary carbon offsets. 733, 734 There is also
a risk that carbon offsetting, which has been initiated as a voluntary form of carbon reductions, is now
becoming the means used by the industry to ‘reduce’ emissions. This effectively means that producer
responsibility is turned into customer responsibility, which may be problematic if no action to reduce
fuel use is taken by the airline. As such, carbon offsetting can be seen as a controversial solution to
climate protection, because it potentially diverts from the real causes of the problems and therefore
bypasses the structural and technological changes that need to be made to achieve long-term GHG
reductions. There is also a moral or guilt dimension to carbon offsetting – redemption through payment.
Thus, tourists can travel on Air Canada, for example, and pay C$ 12.80 for the 800 kilograms of CO 2
that they will have released into the atmosphere between Vancouver and Montreal.
The usefulness of forests as sinks in particular is debated for a number of reasons, including the vast
areas needed for forestry schemes, the risk of forest fires, pests and climate change as well as social and
other factors that may affect the permanency of the forests. Furthermore, space for offsetting competes
with space for biofuels, so to some extent, a choice has to be made between these. Concerns also relate
to the difficulty of measuring carbon uptake, sinks as being a short-term solution, the insecurity of
projects, and the long-term costs of administration/monitoring. Moreover, in tree-planting schemes the
initial rates of sequestration are low and, therefore, it can be years before travel emissions are actually
offset. Notwithstanding these caveats, the enhancement of carbon sinks through forestry is recognised
in the Kyoto Protocol (Article 3) as a mitigation measure.
The second option of offsetting is by investing in measures for energy efficiency elsewhere or in the
future (for example in developing countries by using the money to replace a planned coal electricity
plant by one driven by gas or including carbon sequestration). This would support the wider goal of
tourism as a means to alleviating poverty and can spread the use of renewable technology in these
countries. However, substantial criticism has been forwarded against offsetting projects within the
CDM, both with regard to their efficiency and sustainable development benefits.
Carbon offsetting is only one of the available mechanisms to mitigate aviation’s impacts on climate. An
integrated strategy for the mitigation of aviation’s impact on climate change should include a number
of mechanisms:
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fuel reduction through improved operations and air traffic management;
demand management;
research on the use of alternative fuels and engine’s efficiency;
market mechanisms (taxation);
emission-charges;
voluntary initiatives.
Another issue regarding carbon offsetting is related to the choice of an offsetting service. Travellers
need clear guidelines on how they should choose the best available carbon offsetting service. Although
transparency is the main guiding principle for such selection, there is a need for clear criteria and
guidelines that will allow the comparison and evaluation of the effectiveness of various carbon offsetting
services. These guidelines could be further linked to a set of global principles for sustainable tourism
and criteria for sustainable tourism certification programmes.
12.4.3 Long-haul Travel Reductions and Poverty Alleviation
The analysis in Chapter 11 found that a globally averaged tourist journey is estimated to generate
0.25 t of CO 2 emissions. A small share of tourist trips, however, emits much more than this: while the
aviation based trips account for 17% of all tourism trips, they cause about 40 % of CO 2 emissions
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