Detection and analysis of the causal relation between tourism and greenhouse gas emission: an empirical approach.

Abstract

Manmade climate change is a threat to the inhabitants of our planet and greenhouse gas emissions have been identi ed as the main cause of this climate change. In order to reduce the e ects of climate change, we need to signi cantly reduce emissions of greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere. While the tourism industry clearly contributes to greater emissions from aviation, but other sectors of emissions besides aviation are also in uenced by tourism activities. In order to reduce the overall emissions signi cantly it is necessary to also identify the wider range of tourists impacts across all economic sectors which are contributing to greenhouse gasses emissions. The overall carbon footprint for a given country is estimated by calculating emissions from all di erent economic sectors such as agriculture, transportation etc. There has been a lack of research which empirically identi es how tourists activities manifest as carbon emissions across the full range of economic sectors, not just aviation. This study develops a method to identify causal relations between tourists numbers and greenhouse gas emissions across a range of economic sectors using data for the United Kingdom, Australia and 20 European Union countries. To perform time series causality analysis a combination of the established Granger causality test, and the novel Convergent Cross mapping (CCM) has been used. Convergent Cross mapping (CCM) has not previously been used for this application in tourism research and it overcomes some of the limitations associated with Granger causality analysis for the data available. The causality analysis performed revealed several causal links among di erent sectors of emissions with tourist numbers. It shows that in the UK, inbound tourist numbers are causing an increase in emissions from the category of Waste Management and also there is some evidence that increased emissions from Business sectors are caused by Tourist numbers. In Australia there is weak evidence that Tourist numbers might be causing increased emissions from the sectors of Industrial Processes and Product Use. This identi cation of a causal relationship between tourists numbers and wider economic sectors emissions contributes signi cantly to our understanding of the overall impact of tourism on greenhouse gas emissions in each case. In addition to this, in the UK and Australia, emissions from Agriculture seems to be causing Tourist numbers. These reverse causal e ects are argued as due to the e ects of economic third-variables, which might be in uencing both emissions and tourism.