Measurement Of Carbon Emissions In Regional Tourism And Its Factorization

Under the clmiate change background, the development of low-carbon tourism is the only way to sustainable tourism in all nations. It is needs to decompose of different regions for the national strategic target of energy saving and emission reduction of tourism. Therefore, it is an important scientific issue to calculate the carbon dioxide emissions of regional tourism, to decompose the driving factors of the carbon dioxide emissions of regional tourism. The project takes powerful energy consumption and tourism industry Province of Jiangsu as the typical example to establish a systematic analysis framework which integrates elements, processes and mechanisms by comprehensively using the relevant theories of tourism geography, ecological economics, input-output economics, evolutionary economics, etc., with the fundamental point of measuring for carbon dioxide emissions, the supporting point of mechanism for carbon dioxide emissions, and the final point of regulating paths for low-carbon tourism. By virtue of the multiple methods including the mathematical modeling, GIS techniques, structural equation model, etc., the project breakthroughs the limitation of traditional research techniques and methods of low-carbon tourism, expands the views of measuring and improves the accuracy of measuring, expounds the new phenomena and characters of carbon dioxide emissions, intensively reveals the impacting mechanism of technical and institutional elements. Consequently, it will deepen the cognition of character and mechanism of carbon dioxide emissions of regional tourism industry, give new meanings for sustainable tourism, enrich the theoretical connotation and methodology of tourism geography and cultural geography, and have guiding significance and application value to promote the construction of tourist industrial ecology civilization. The main contents and conclusions in the article are as follows:(1)The tourism industry is highly sensitive to the impacts of climate change and global warming, as good weather is a high priority for tourists. Carbon dioxide emissions from tourism transport have to be monitored to enable sustainable tourism development in the 21st century, particularly as fossil-fuel energy sources are becoming scarce. Assessing carbon dioxide emissions from regional tourism transport is difficult but these data are needed to implement effective protocols to reduce emissions. The substitutional bottom-up analysis method is used to calculate the carbon dioxide emissions from tourism transport. This analysis method is used for the first time. Based on a region’s per capita GDP, per capita income and transport route distance per vehicle, we calculated that the daily tourism distances per person in Jiangsu Province was 6.59 km in 2011, respectively. Based on on-the-spot data questionnaires and public transport data as well as tourism data (MusTT model), we calculated that the major tourism transport modes in 2011 were air(12.23%), train(13.27%), coach(52.71%), car(16.60%) and others(5.19%). The transport coefficients of carbon dioxide emissions resulting from air, train, coach, car travel and others were 275,9,28,77 and 15 g/pkm, respectively. Our results were adjusted to account for tourists that came from other Provinces to the destination Province vs destination Province tourists who traveled to other Provinces. We conclude that:(1) Carbon dioxide emissions related to tourism transport were 14.28 Mt. (2) The CO2 emissions from air, train, coach, car and other travel were 7.65,0.27,3.36, and 2.83, 0.18Mt, respectively. The total emissions from air and car travel were 7.92 Mt(73.36%). This percentage, which is lower than the world’s average value, indicates that emissions from air and car transport in the tourism sector are the main contributions to carbon dioxide emissions in China. The percentage of tourists using public transport(train and coach) was higher than the world’s average. Our results indicate that Chinese tourists prefer to travel by train and coach. We surmise that the overall transition of energy saving and carbon dioxide emission reduction resulting from tourism transport has to be reduced from high coefficients to low or even zero coefficients. Considering that the numbers of inbound tourists from neighboring Provinces are similar, the results may converge. Our results indicate that tourism catchment area is an important factor and this needs to be balanced with convenient transport links, residents’ tourism preferences, and the distribution of tourism destinations in each Province.(2) Accommodation is an important sector in carbon dioxide emission from tourism. It will promote the regional, comprehensive and segmentable study development to measure carbon dioxide emission for regional classification accommodation. It is a important and difficult step to ascertain the coefficients for different classification accommodations.The study of coefficient of accommodation has following characters. First, the progress of different spatial scale is unbalance. Over the past decade, the representative systems of coefficients at the global scale of 2000-2007 and 2008-present are Gossling and Peeters respectively. The representative coefficients at national scale belong to Becken, and the results are cited by many articles of national, regional, unitary, even global scales. In contrast, the coefficients at regional and unitary scales are rarer. Secondly, the study of different classification accommodations is relatively weak. Thirdly, the coefficients in different countries and regions vary considerably and their directivity is obvious. Therefore, targeted coefficient is conducive to the result of measure carbon dioxide emission.Taking Jiangsu Province as an regional example, the data of water, electricity and natural gas consumption were collected through on-the-spot survey. With their conversion factors of the region, the coefficients of carbon dioxide emission for different accommodations are made. The coefficient(kg/bed·night) of five star, four star, three star, two star, one star and other accommodation was 60.34、36.15、16.87、 9.76 and 3.53, respectively, and the coefficients were targeted at the region. To measure the carbon dioxide emissions for different classification accommodations, the bottom-up analysis is made.The results can be obtained as follows: ①The emissions of accommodation in Jiangsu Province were 1.96 Mt in 2011. ②The figures of hotel and the other accommodation were 1.12 Mt and 0.83 Mt, respectively, and their percent were 57.40% and 42.60%, respectively. Hotel is an important field for energy saving and emission reduction in accommodation, and the other accommodation is an also innegligible type for decompose emission reduction obligation.③With lower grade of hotel, the emissions of hotel were less. Hotels were the key types to reduce the emission of accommodation, and 5 star and 4 star were the important sources of hotel emissions. The within-Province inequality of Jiangsu was obvious also. Some measures are recommended to energy saving and emission reduction in accommodation. Mitigation measures in accommodation establishments focus on renewable energy and energy efficiency. The hotel sector is particularly well organised (especially the larger hotel chains) and there are a number of practical sources of information to help managers implement energy conservation and efficiencymeasures. One long-standing institution is the International Hotels Environment Initiative (IHEI). Tourist should practice low-carbon tourism behavior in room temperature, restaurants, water temperature, lighting, cooling (food storage) and so on.(3)The carbon dioxide emissions from recreation activities are important carbon sources in tourism industry and their measurings are component to analyze the emission distribution pattern from tourism industry entirety. Taking Jiangsu Province as a case, the present study accounts for carbon dioxide emissions from recreation activities based on the bottom-up analysis from the actual energy consumption and top-down approach from investment and output table, respectively, and one result on the emissions is compared with another, with the reason on the deviation being discussed. The results are as follows: ①Based on the real energy consumption and emission factors in Jiangsu Province, it is the first attempt to make the coefficients of emissions for different recreation activities in China. For the reference year of 2012, the bottom-up analysis estimated a direct emissions of 0.58 Mt for the recreation activities within the Province, with 72.30% coming from the types of vocation and sightseeing, and the latter with higher per tourist per trip should bear more obligation of carbon emission reduction. ②The direct emissions in 2007 by the recreation activities were 0.38 Mt. Moreover, the top-down analysis calculated indirect effects to be 2.46 Mt of CO2. The indirect emissions account for about 86.63% of the total emissions, which means that the low-carbonization intermediates from tourism’s related industries should be provided for its energy saving and emission reduction. The total emissions from recreation activities account for about 8.80% of the total emissions from tourism industry, and the percentage is higher than that of developing country. ③The Comparative study of emissions from recreation activities between the bottom-up analysis and the top-down approach is made for the first time. The top-down approach estimates emissions from recreation activities is 8.95% above the bottom-up estimate. The find can be confirmed from the compare of related researches in China. The research based on the two methods can combine the integrity of direct and indirect emissions, and the depth of different recreation activities.(4) The article, taking Jiangsu Province as a case, based on the input-output tables and tourism expenditures of 1997,2002 and 2007, makes an analysis of the direct emissions and indirect emissions of tourism from food, accommodation, transportation, sightseeing, shopping, entertainment and postal services. The results are as follows:The total emissions of tourism industry in Jiangsu Province in 1997, 2002 and 2007 were 9.64935 Mt、17.67100 Mt and 42.61987 Mt, respectively, and the annual rate of growth was 16.01%. The indirect emissions account for about 63% of the total emissions. These percentages of food, accommodation, transportation, sightseeing, shopping and entertainment of total emissions in Jiangsu Province are comparatively balanced. To some extent, it reflects the character that the percentage of emissions from tourism sightseeing in China is higher than that of global level and many national levels. The total emissions of domestic tourists are evidently higher than those of inbound tourists; however, the per-trip emissions of the inbound tourists are 4-7 times more than those of domestic tourists. There are significant differences of total emissions and per capita emissions among the cities within the Province. These results imply the emission reduction of tourism industry not only needs the share responsibility from all tourism sectors but also relies strongly on the cooperation with the related industries, which offer the intermediate goods for the consuming of tourism. Domestic tourists are the main carbon source, but still require more emission space due to low per capita emissions. The cities with higher per capita emissions should bear more obligation of emission reduction.(5)It can help us to tap the potentiality of energy saving and emission reduction of tourism and regulatory pathways to comprehensive analysis of the institutional and technical influence factors on regional tourism carbon emissions of tourism. The article explores the mechanism of influencing factors by Kaya identity and Logarithmic Mean Divisia Index. The results are as follows:Among the five factors that affecting emissions of tourism industry, industry size and expenditure size are generally found to be principal drivers of emission growth, whereas the main factors of restricting emissions are energy intensity and energy share. In addition, the effect of consumption structure shows fluctuation in different stages. These results imply it should be the main direction of emission reduction to reduce energy use intensity and develop low-carbon tourism behavior.(6)It is needs to implement low-carbon production and consumption patterns of both supplying and purchasing parties for energy saving and emission reduction of tourism. A structural equation model of the tourist’s willingness to participate in low-carbon tourism was built. The model contains four latent variables:the congnition of low-carbon tourism is an exogenous latent variable, and the tourists’ low-carbon consumption habits, the area’s low-carbon tourism environment and the willingness to participate in low-carbon tourism are endogenous latent variables. The author obtain the following conclusions:the congnition of low-carbon tourism, the tourists’ low-carbon consumption habits and the area’s low-carbon tourism environment all affect the willingness to participate in low-carbon tourism,with the biggest effect of the congnition of low-carbon tourism. So the development of low-carbon tourism essentially depends on the improvement of the low-carbon literacy. Finally, based on the relevant sections of the previous research chapters and sections, the energy saving emission reducing measures were made from the perspective of tourism transportation, accommodation, recreation activities, tourism industry and its relevant industries, energy structure optimization etc.