Impact of Tourism on Environment and Climate Change

We all know that tourism sector is one of the largest contributors to GDP for a large number of countries. In India also, it contributes the highest share to GDP among all economic sectors. However, often we miss out on the fact that the same tourism sector is one of the largest contributors to the environment, but negatively. Its contribution is significant towards global warming and climate change.
Not many attempts have been made by researchers to estimate how tourism activities impact the environment with quantitative measures. Perhaps the prime challenge is data. At ACRA, we thought of working on this a few times in previous years. However, though we started some basic data work towards this direction, but had to stop working because of some unavoidable circumstances.
Again we have decided to work on this area and planning to do a project, self-sponsored though, towards publishing a research paper. It requires data from multiple sources along with skilled researchers to fetch data from these sources. We will test certain econometrics and other analytics models to estimate tourism’s impact on environment and subsequently, on climate change. If we are successful, the paper will throw some light on strategic intervention by the governments as well as other stakeholders to make tourism more sustainable and environment friendly.