Calculating tourism's carbon footprint: measuring the impact of investments

Abstract In this paper, we propose broadening the concept of tourism's carbon footprint to include not only emissions embodied in tourism consumption but also emissions linked to the investments of the tourism sector. The measure proposed, the whole carbon footprint , implies allocating the emissions linked to the production of capital goods required for tourism goods and services to this sector. The omission of investments, e.g., the construction of hotels and infrastructures, leads to an underestimation of the tourism sector's environmental responsibility. The methodology is based on a life cycle assessment input–output (LCA-IO) model that we apply to the Spanish tourism sector for the period of 1995–2007. Our results show that the inclusion of tourism investment in the carbon footprint calculations increases the industry's responsibility by 34% due to the importance of civil infrastructure and construction related to hotels and catering and imported electrical and electronic machinery and transport vehicles. More importantly, we find that the weak improvement in the eco-efficiency of tourism investments (virtual carbon by million euros of tourism services) increases the pressure on the environment of the expansive tourism sector and on claims for mitigation targets that include capital investments.