Identifying the Carbon Emissions Damage to International Tourism: Turn a Blind Eye

Abstract

The importance of sustainable tourism is largely discussed in environmental literature under two different main streams: first, an ample amount of literature is available on the role of international tourism in economic development; second, the existing literature mainly focused on estimating tourism carbon footprints across countries. Limited work has been done on identifying the cost of carbon emissions on the tourism industry, which is evaluated in this study to fill the existing literature gap by using a large panel of 132 countries between 1995 and 2018. The results show that carbon emissions damage, methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions, and population density substantially decrease inbound tourism and international tourism receipts that result in an impact on the increase in international tourism expenditures across countries. The ex-ante analysis shows that inbound tourism will likely decrease from 19.546% to 16.854% due to an increase in carbon emissions damage of 0.357% to 1.349% for the period 2020–2028. Subsequently, international tourism expenditures will decrease from 19.758% to 12.384% by increasing carbon emissions damage from0.832% to 1.025%. Finally, international tourism revenues will subsequently decline from23.362% to 18.197% due to lowering carbon emissions damage from 0.397% to −0.113% over a time horizon.