Carbon Management in Tourism: Mitigating the Impacts on Climate Change

Climate change is one of the single most important global environmental issues facing the world today and is emerging as a major topic in tourism studies. Tourism is one of the world’s largest industries; it both contributes to, and will be notably affected by, climate change. Given the emerging global legal frameworks to reduce emissions of greenhouse gasses, growing costs of carbon and pro-environmentally orientated customers, carbon management in tourism is a necessity. Tourism must take responsive actions to enable travel and tourism to deliver the peak experiences that tourists seek with a lower carbon footprint.

Carbon Management in Tourism is the first book devoted to carbon emission reductions and to showcase a wide range of practical mitigation measures. This book provides a comprehensive overview by combining theory and practice of climate change mitigation in global tourism, addressing various levels of scale, such as global, national, and regional tourism systems, as well as individual tourism businesses. It integrates a thorough scientific discussion of the causes of emissions growth, along with an analysis of the major options to reduce emissions, and state-of-the-art carbon management practices. Detailed case studies provide examples of tourism businesses or destinations that have successfully reduced emissions of greenhouse gasses, with consideration of economic and socio-cultural issues integrated throughout.

This timely and important volume is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as academic researchers interested in Tourism, Environmental Management, Geography and Carbon Management.

Stefan Gossling is a Professor at the Department of Service Management, Lund University, and the School of Business and Economics, Linnaeus University, Sweden. He is also the research coordinator at the Western Norway Research Institute’s Research Centre for Sustainable Tourism.