Environmental Impacts of European Tourist Transport
EcoPolis
Environmental Impacts of European Tourist Transport
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Tourism constitutes between 15% and 20% of all kilometres travelled by
passengers in Europe. In 2000, the total number of tourism journeys by
EU25 citizens was 875 million journeys of which 61% were domestic, 29%
inside the EU, 4% to European countries outside the EU and 6% to other
continents. The development of long distance air travel markets,
European enlargement and the realisation of EU transport
infrastructure suggest that the demand for tourism transport will
continue to grow considerably in Europe. It is therefore necessary to
better understand EU citizens' habits, travel destinations and
associated impacts in order to set up efficient policies.
Research on the environmental impacts of tourism mainly focuses on the
impacts at the tourism destination but neglects the impacts associated
with transport to the destinations. This is mostly due to a lack of
integrated data as in most cases transport models fail to represent
(intercontinental) tourism trips and tourism data does not include
information on travel distances, transport modes or domestic
journeys.
In this study, the authors adopted the World Tourism Organisation
definition of tourism, meaning that the trip must encompass at least
one night at the destination and last less than a year. Two
complementary databases were used to build a model that provides data
on domestic and international passenger transport volume by mode (air,
rail, coach, car, ferries) for the year 2000-2020. Five impact
categories are considered: noise, climate change, accidents, air
quality, and landscape. Their results are as follows:
(*) With regard to the number of journeys, tourism is dominated by
the domestic and EU25 markets (90% of journeys) and by ground
transportation (80% of all journeys).
(*) Outbound tourism is forecast to represent 1371 million journeys by
2020 (a 60% increase compared to 2000). Air transport is expected to
show the largest increase at 190% especially for flows originating
from the new Member States and for long distance trips. Rail demand
comes second and is expected to grow significantly between countries
with recent high-speed link realisations. Volume by road is predicted
to increase in some areas but to decrease in others.
(*) Climate change is by far the most significant environmental impact
and is followed by air quality. Air transport has a share of 50%-78%
of all impacts and was responsible for 80% of greenhouse gas emissions
in the tourism transport sector in 2000. Road transport causes the
greatest impacts on air quality while rail, coach and ferry represent
almost 20% of all trips but have a very limited environmental impact
due to relatively low emissions on a per passenger basis.
The authors conclude that as almost 80% of the impacts are caused by
air transport which represents only 20% of all trips, there are some
opportunities to mitigate environmental burdens while affecting only a
relatively small part of the tourism economy. Environmental policies
in tourism should therefore consider measures reducing both air
transport and intercontinental travel as these sectors have the
strongest growth and are associated with the strongest environmental
impacts.
(Source: Peeters P., Szimba E., Duijnisveld M. (2007) «Major
environmental impacts of European tourism transport», Journal of
Transport Geography 15:83-93)
Contacts:peet...@nhtv.nl, szi...@iww.uni-
karlsruhe.de,d...@nea.nlgthornton@rsk.co.uk