Europe Europe Europe

Tourism: European scale

The carbon footprint of global tourism

Tourism contributes significantly to global gross domestic product, and is forecast to grow at an annual 4%, thus outpacing many other economic sectors. Between 2009 and 2013, tourism’s global carbon footprint has increased from 3.9 to 4.5 GtCO2e, four times more than previously estimated, accounting for about 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Transport, shopping and food are significant contributors. The majority of this footprint is exerted by and in high-income countries. The rapid increase in tourism demand is effectively outstripping the decarbonization of tourism-related technology. We project that, due to its high carbon intensity and continuing growth, tourism will constitute a growing part of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions (6).


Analysis of data on international tourism movement between 178 countries for the period 1995 to 2010 showed the preferences of tourists for warmer destinations and closer counties (1). In addition, climate change projections for 2080 (A2, B1 and B2 emissions scenarios) showed that global warming is, on the whole, bad news for warm destinations in terms of loss of competitiveness. Hence, it shows how the search for a more comfortable climate is found to be one of the main motivations in determining international global tourism flows and, as such, climate change would imply a loss of attractiveness for traditional winter resorts and traditional warmer destinations around the world. However, on the other hand, it seems that global warming would increase attractiveness for high latitude countries (1).

The Mediterranean



The overall enhancement on summery tourist comfort in north-western European countries and the overall degradation in the Mediterranean could lead to an increase of domestic holidays in the former at the expense of travelling to the latter (2). In previous studies it was suggested that this redistribution across European countries may be equivalent to some 14 billion euros of expenditure (3).

Losses and gains of tourism revenues

Climatic conditions might become more favorable for tourism in the north of Europe and less so in the south. Climate model projections for 2100 under the so-called IPCC SRES A1B emission scenario (equaling moderate global warming) show that, under current economic conditions, tourism revenues may be up to 0.45 % of GDP per year lower in 2100 than current revenues in most notably the Mediterranean regions. Other areas, however (most notably Northern Europe), would gain from altered climatic conditions, up to 0.32 % of GDP on an annual basis (5). The potential losers are the southern European countries such as Bulgaria (−0.80 %) and Spain (−0.73 %) while the winners are Estonia (0.64 %), Latvia (0.63 %), Slovenia (0.62 %) and Slovakia (0.34 %). These results only refer to intra-EU tourism demand (being little over 70% of the total number of tourists): the share of non-EU tourists was not considered. Also the impact of adaptation measures, such as lowering accommodation prices in southern Europe to compensate for less favorable weather conditions in the summer season, was not considered (5).


The Mediterranean




  1. Rosselló and Santana-Gallego (2014)
  2. Amengual et al. (2014)
  3. Amelung and Moreno (2012), in: Amengual et al. (2014)
  4. Amelung and Moreno (2012); Bafaluy et al. (2013), both in: Amengual et al. (2014)
  5. Barrios and Ibañez (2015)
  6. Lenzen et al. (2018)