We Are Hurting The Earth By Exploring It

Imagine big beautiful culture filled cities, peaceful countrysides, roaring rivers, and gorgeous, calm beaches. It is no wonder that so many people love to travel. However, we often ignore a dark side of traveling — the detrimental environmental impact that tourism causes. This is a bit ironic to think about: Travelling to see the beauty the earth holds is slowly hurting it. It is actually a really bad problem that everyone on this planet is facing right now.

Researchers were able to determine that 8% of world-wide emissions between 2009 and 2013 come from tourism, and that emissions linked to travel are projected to grow 4% a year (Lenzen et al., 2018). Hence, tourism has a large carbon footprint that is going to keep growing if no one does anything about it.

Within the tourism industry there are differences in the amount of resources that each sector uses. What are some of the main ways in which people travel? For most Americans, it may be by driving or flying. Some might choose to go on a cruise trip. All of these require energy and fuel, and we must ask ourselves: Where does that energy and fuel come from? Electricity cannot be given without any cost. It must be generated, be it through traditional gasoline, coal, or renewable sources like solar and wind. Transportation, therefore, is a first culprit for the generation of carbon emissions, accounting for almost 50% of all tourism emissions.

This visualization utilizes area as visual encoding in order to show the percentage that each sector takes up. The visualization was made with graphical integrity in mind. Humans are really bad at reliably taking the surface area and converting that perception into a number (Tufte, 2004). However, this graph is essentially trying to show that transport accounts for nearly the same amount of emissions as everything else. Putting 2 stacked bar charts, each representing 50% of emissions, allows the viewer to get an accurate representation of the toll that transportation takes on emissions.

Diving further into transportation, it is clear that not every transportation method places the same strain on resources. Air travel accounts for 20% of emissions in the tourism industry, which means that it is a whopping 41% of all transportation emissions, even though other forms of transportation are used in greater quantities (Lenzen et al., 2018). In addition, carbon emissions tend to be highest for those transportations that use fossil fuels, such as airplane jet fuel and vehicles that use traditional gasoline.

This problem has been made worse over the years. As more and more countries opened up for travel, and more countries caught up with international trading and economy, it is only obvious that tourism would increase globally, and that results in more waste carbon dioxide emissions. The following graph summarizes average global tourism and average CO2 emissions from 2000 to 2012, and it is clear that an upward trend can be observed, where as global average tourism spending increased by 60% from 2000 to 2010, the relevant average CO2 emissions increased by almost 30%.

What this signifies is that as global tourism increases, the relevant environmental costs increase by about a 2 to 1 ratio. It is then not surprising where the 8% figure from the beginning of this piece comes from. (Lenzen et. al. 2018).

Data also shows that countries with more tourism expenses tend to also be more developed and use more electricity. In particular, countries with more tourism tend to have a higher internet usage percentage and mobile phone usage percentage. The following visualization ranks the first 50 countries with the most tourism, and although the trend is not very apparent, there is definitely a positive correlation between tourism expense and internet/mobile phone usage.

What this means is that as tourism goes up, the electricity use also goes up with people using computers to surf the internet and having to charge their mobile phones. While electricity itself is not inherently bad for the environment, the way that electricity is produced in this world is an issue. Even though there have been many attempts to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, to the environment through clean energy production methods, coal is still one of the main methods of electricity production in the world. According to World Bank data, 39.168% of the world’s electricity is from coal sources. Even though it is slightly lower than levels from the 2000s and early 2010s, it is still near highs from when World Bank first obtained its data from 1970. Another possible explanation for the increase in electricity use with higher tourism spending may be because countries with more tourism tend to be more affluent. Data compiled from the Forest Policy Hub (Lenzen et al. 2018) shows that as the GDP per capita increases, there is a strong positive correlation to that of carbon footprint per capita. Combining both of these arguments, we can begin to see some reasons why increasing tourism leads to increasing carbon footprint.

Another way to look at this problem of tourism in terms of carbon dioxide emissions is from the perspective of waste through consumption of foods and services. When we travel to another country, we love to buy souvenirs and special items only available in those countries. When we stay in a hotel, almost everything is cleaned daily with cleaning agents produced with plastic and chemicals which result in emissions. Everything provided in the hotel is likely to be wrapped in plastic, and when we go to the beach to relax, chances are, we bring some plastic-wrapped food and drinks (or better yet, order take-out from a restaurant, which comes in a plastic box and bag a lot of the time). More contributions can be listed here, but the point is, plastic and food production is a significant cause of increased emissions. From the Lenzen paper (2018), we see that 30% of tourism’s emissions come from foods and services, and the production and use of plastic cannot be ignored. In 2015, carbon dioxide emissions released due production and transportation of plastics in the US alone amounted to that of 2.1 million passenger cars. There is data that shows that during tourism seasons (usually summer), plastic consumption tends to increase (and it makes sense). One survey done in Mediterranean countries, during the tourism season, plastic waste increased by up to 33%, and in the coastal areas of Italy, the figure is 30%. Not only is the amount of plastic used is increased, increasing demand for production and increasing emissions produced through making plastic, but the increase in plastic waste also contributes to climate change, and an imbalance to the marine environment can further exacerbate the problem.

When we compare the CO2 emissions of countries against their outbound and inbound tourism expenditures, we can see that there is no significant difference between the two directions of tourism on carbon emissions. This validates that the impact of tourism on the environment is a global issue that needs to be addressed by all countries, rather than some in particular. It is also consistent with the finding that transportation plays the biggest role in producing CO2 emissions, as they relate to tourism.

The consistency of the color and size of the points in the graphs makes it easier to pay attention to the relevant quantitative variables, rather than trying to distinguish each category (country). As Stephen Few writes about encoding quantitative data in The Perceptual and Cognitive Limits of Multivariate Data Visualization, “Because color intensity and area only support approximate decoding and rough comparisons, we should only use them when neither 2-D horizontal position, nor 2-D vertical position, nor line length are available” (Few, 2019). This side-by-side scatter plot relies on 2-D horizontal and vertical position to encode the quantitative variables of interest. Therefore, variation in color intensity and area is better left out in order to avoid cluttering the plots and to allow the audience to perceive the relevant information as quickly as possible.

All of what we said here regarding the effects of tourism on the environment by way of CO2 emissions might seem really scary, and it might seem like there is nothing we can do to mitigate this issue. After all, the demand for domestic and international travel will only increase as the general income and welfare globally increases because of globalization and more economic activity across almost anywhere in the world. However, if we can reduce our usage of carbon-releasing energy sources like coal and natural gas, and opt for more renewable energy such as wind, solar, water, and nuclear, we can all help mitigate this global issue while still being able to enjoy exploring nature’s beauty. Indeed, an increasing use in renewable energy sources and nuclear energy generators have been built, and vehicles and trains are beginning to use these alternative sources, with electric cars being increasingly popular and maglev trains in more development than they have been in the last 20 years. We hope that these efforts will help alleviate this global problem of us humans causing harm to the very place we want to explore and have fun.

References

Cho, R. (2020), More Plastic is On The Way: What It Means For Climate Change, Columbia Climate School. https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2020/02/20/plastic-production-climate-change/

Few, S. (2019, September). The Perceptual and Cognitive Limits of Multivariate Data. Perceptual Edge. http://www.perceptualedge.com

Lenzen, M., Sun, Y.-Y., Faturay, F., Ting, Y.-P., Geschke, A., & Malik, A. (2018). The carbon footprint of global tourism. Nature Climate Change, 8(6), 522–528.

Tufte, E. R. (2004). Graphical Integrity. In The visual display of quantitative information. essay, Graphics Press.

Carbon Footprint of Tourism. Sustainable Travel International. (2020, November 19). https://sustainabletravel.org/issues/carbon-footprint-tourism/.

Electricity Production From Coal Sources, The World Bank, 1960–2019. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.ELC.COAL.ZS