Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
sustainable and healthy development of tourism
itself, also concerned with global environment
change. The report from World Tourism Organi-
zation, UNEP, and WMO indicates that tourism
is one of sources of green house gas. Its emis-
sion of the whole sector is 4%-6% of the global
total amount. Among them, transportation and
hotel share the largest part of the emission. It is
predicted that the emission of green house gas in
tourism may increase 1.5 times without efficient
strategy. Hence, it is a inevitable tendency to
develop low-carbon economy in tourism. Energy
consumption of Chinese three industries shows
the proportion of energy consumption is ranked
as the second industry, the third industry, the first
industry. And it witnesses obvious up tendency
for the third industry which focuses on transporta-
tion, and it gradually exceeds the second industry
(Zhang L. F., 2008). UNEP issued two reports
on World Climate day of 2008, they are
Kick the
Habit: The UN Guide to Climate Neutrality
and
Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation in
the Tourism
. In May of 2009, World Economy
forum in Climate Change World Trade Summit
in Copenhagen of Denmark submitted the report
Forward to Low-carbon tourism.
It advocated to
reduce emission of green house gas in all sectors
such as transportation and accommodation, and
it also discussed market mechanism and innova-
tive financial methods during the transformation
to green economy. In February 2009, Criteria of
Global Sustainable tourism was carried out of-
ficially in Barcelona which requires developing
tourism needs to avoid having negative effect on
geographic environment, local organization and
cultural heritage in travel destination to realize
tourism sustainable development.
The publication of mentioned reports and
criteria indicates it contains potential necessity
to develop low-carbon economy in tourism, and
some key trade organizations led by world tourism
organization have adopt relative strategies to guide
and regularize low-carbon movement of tourism.
The necessity presents in following aspects.
•
Tourism involves a lot of fields with huge
energy consumption and emission. As
tourism relates with foods and beverages,
accommodation, transportation, travel,
shopping, entertainment and recreation.
For a long time, restaurant, transportation,
scenic spot have discharged a large amount
of CO
2
which have great impact on global
climate and environment. As a high con-
sumption location, hotel has to consume a
plenty of resource and energy in construc-
tion and operation; at the same time, it
will discharge huge amount of air pollut-
ants to be city pollution source of carbon
emission. For example, a three-star hotel
in middle size will consume the energy
of 1400 tons of coal and at least exhaust
4200 tons of CO
2
, 70 tons of dust, and 28
tons of sulfur dioxide per year, while a
big hotel with floor area of 80000-100000
square meters will consume 130-180 thou-
sand tons of norm-coal. Tourism needs
the transportation such as motor vehicles,
steamer, train, bus, plan etc, each of which
will have somewhat pollution to the air.
Audit Office of America published a re-
port to prove that CO
2
emission from car
and plane is the main factor for air pollu-
tion and global warming. Jet aircraft with
passengers will exhaust 23 kilogram CO
2
every 100 kilometers, car will discharge
about 18 kilogram CO
2
every 100 kilome-
ters, while train's emission of CO
2
is less
than 5 kilograms every 100 kilometers
(Wang J., 2009).
•
Development of low-carbon economy in
tourism is an inevitable path to cope with
global climate change to transfer from ex-
tensive to intensive operation so as to re-
alize sustainable development of tourism.
As people know, tourism highly relies on
resource and is sensitive to climate envi-
ronment. The change of climate environ-
ment will have direct impact on time and
