To Travel or Not to Travel? Both Have Implications for Sustainable Tourism

Abstract

The increasing concern over tourism's greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and its subsequent impact on climate change has led some to recommend strict measures to reduce the volume of travel. While the reduction of tourism's GHG emissions is an essential piece of tourism's sustainability, there has been little discussion of the implications that reducing travel could have on a destination's triple bottom line (ecological, sociocultural, and economic sustainability). Much of the sustainable tourism literature has historically focused on maximizing tourism's benefits to residents' quality of life, the environment, cultural heritage, and the economy, but these traditional metrics have been largely removed from the recent discussion on tourism and climate change. This article proposes a conceptual model that incorporates the traditional metrics of sustainability with the net amount of GHG emitted to help determine whether travel has a net positive or negative impact. While the model is entirely theoretical, it depicts sustainable tourism as not solely a function of GHG emissions, but a function of maximizing tourism's positive impacts (handprint) within destinations while minimizing its GHG emissions (footprint). The article concludes by demonstrating how the framework can be applied to increase tourism's sustainability within destinations as well as globally.

Dimensions of mobilities, tourism and transition of cultural hegemony: a qualitative inquiry from Sri Lanka

“…To support such deeper stimulations of individual feelings and anticipations in tracing sensitive issues such as changing cultural trends, qualitative approach was employed as it was identified more appropriate in answering research questions. Based on their findings Boley et al (2014) have emphasised the importance of qualitative inquiries using in-depth interviews to deepen the understanding of psychological, social and political nexus of the communities in tourism development areas. The literature also reveals that empirical approaches in tourism and mobilities studies are of inadequate.…”

Sustainability and Tourism Competitiveness in Protected Areas: State of Art and Future Lines of Research

“…As derived from these papers, the need to design methodologies and indicators is highlighted [125], that enable the quantification of the impact of tourist flows on residents' quality of life, the environment, cultural heritage, and the economy and climate change [126], so that the tourist activity can be developed in a balanced and sustainable way.…”

Children as tour guides

“…Our study engaged proximity tourism as an approach to interacting with local nature environments, one that might enable enhanced environmental and financial sustainability in tourism. Proximity tourism eliminates the need for long distance air travel, which we know contributes much of carbon emissions associated with tourism (Boley, 2015;Eijgelaar, Nawijn, Barten, Okuhn, & Dijkstra, 2016;Jeuring & Haartsen, 2017). Proximity tourism also requires less financial and time commitment for families as they can return to their place of residence following their excursions or may potentially arrange accommodations near by, similar to a 'staycation' (Bloom, Nawijn, Geurts, Kinnunen, & Korpela, 2016).…”