New Paper Questions Airlines Potential to Hit Carbon Reduction Targets
Saturday, 20 Sep, 2009
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Stefan Gossling
In a new paper, tourism carbon Gurus insist that airlines won’t be able to reduce their carbon emissions in line with their governments’ committments.
As the international negotiations of a successor to the Kyoto Protocol intensive in anticipation of the COP-15 in Copenhagen in December, each nation and major economic sector is assessing its ability to contribute to global greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reductions over the crucial next 10-30 years.
Tourism is no exception and the Gothenburg Symposium is to make an important contribution to ‘sealing the deal’ in Copenhagen. This review of the mitigation challenge facing the tourism sector reveals the links between tourism, climate change and the tourism sector’s own voluntary mitigation commitments interact in a way that, if not guided by strategic international policy framework, will ultimately be detrimental to the development of tourism or a roadblock to effective greenhouse gas emission reductions that are required to avoid ‘dangerous’ climate change.
The scope of the mitigation challenge in the tourism sector is considerable, with a increasingly large gap between ‘business-as-usual’ emission growth trends and the World Tourism & Travel Council (WTTC) recently announced ‘aspirational’ emission reduction targets for 2020 and 2035. Analysis further reveals that with the current high growth emission trends in tourism, the sector could become a major global source of GHGs in the future, as other economic sectors are required to make significant emission reductions.
Most future GHG emissions from tourism are found to be linked to continued rapid growth in air travel and increased distances travelled by tourists, and thus tourism cannot close its emissions gap without substantive changes in future emissions from aviation. International aviation will be one of the key issues to be addressed in global and national climate policy at COP-15 in Copenhagen, with several policy proposals currently being considered Assuming realistic emission reductions promised by the aviation sector through technological improvements and management efficiencies are achieved, there are still no aviation industry projections of absolute emission reductions from current levels by 2020 or even 2035.
Over the next three decades, in order to meet absolute emission reductions consistent with what the international community has agreed is required to avoid dangerous climate change, the aviation sector will need to purchase emission reduction credits from other sectors that are able to surpass their emission reduction targets or alternatively achieve deeper emission cuts through reduced passenger kilometres. Looking beyond 2020, it will be increasingly difficult for aviation to purchase emission reduction credits from other sectors as they will struggle to achieve deeper emission cuts and in some policy frameworks, aviation may be restricted from doing so. Beyond 2030 biofuels show some promise for replacing a share of kerosene fuels and assuming technical obstacles can be overcome, the challenge of cultivating sufficient quantities will remain a crucial limitation. To replace current worldwide aviation fuel requirements with Jatropha based biofuel, for example, would require a land area approximately the size of 1 million square kilometres combined.
With air travel currently representing 40% of total tourism sector emissions and up to 53% in 2035, it is difficult to envision how the sector could achieve absolute emission reductions in the absence of absolute reductions in the aviation sector. Consequently, if the tourism sector is to at all act on its stated emission reduction target of -50% by 2035 (WTTC 2009), then it must begin to envision tourism futures that are less dependent on air travel. This represents a radical departure from current perspectives on tourism development, but based on current and projected energy use in the sector, represents the only realistic approach to achieve the stated emission reduction targets over the next 25 years.
Such alternative futures for tourism in a green world economy would also strategically reduce the sector’s exposure to future impacts of climate policy on the aviation sector, but the implications for tourism as development strategy in some developing nations will need to be reconsidered as a result. The tourism sector as a whole should also support policy and directly invest in research and development for low carbon and carbon neutral transportation that will be fundamental to the long-term prosperity of the global tourism economy.
Extract from: Can Tourism ‘Seal the Deal’ of its Mitigation Commitments?:
The Challenge of Achieving ‘Aspirational’ Emission Reduction Targets
By Daniel Scott University of Waterloo, Canada; Paul Peeters University of Applied Sciences, Centre for Sustainable Tourism and Transport, Breda, The Netherlands;
Stefan Gössling Department of Service Management, Lund University, Sweden & Research Centre for Sustainable Tourism, Western Norway Research Institute
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