Measuring carbon dioxide emissions from energy consumption by tourism in Yangtze River Delta

Climate change is projected to have great impact on tourism in various ways;however,tourism also contributes to climate change through the carbon dioxide emissions from transport,accommodation and other activities.Now low-carbon tourism is becoming a popular choice to protect the environment for tourists.A lot of people have already accepted the low-carbon conception,and more and more people like it.But there are still numerous hurdles on the road to really achieve the low-carbon goal in our travels,because there is a large amount of direct energy consumption in the form of fossil fuels or indirect energy consumption in the form of electricity during the whole journey.And this consumption directly leads to more emissions of carbon dioxide.According to international experience,measuring carbon dioxide emissions from tourism is a key step to developing low-carbon tourism.However,the study of low-carbon tourism in China is still in its initial stage. Under the background of global energy conservation and emissions reduction,this paper builds up a rational method for measuring carbon dioxide emissions from tourism according to the situation of Chinese tourism.This measurement is based on a better understanding of the conception of low carbon,and it can strip energy consumptions away from energy consumptions by related industries by using tourist consuming minus coefficient.Taking the Yangtze River Delta as an example,we attempt to measure carbon dioxide emissions from tourism of Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces as well as Shanghai,and then compare and analyze the results of measurement. The results are shown as follows.In the present stage,carbon dioxide emissions from tourism present an increasing trend.Moreover,there is a positive correlation between carbon dioxide emissions from tourism and the gross income of tourism in the Yangtze River Delta.It should be noticed that the main part in the total amount of carbon dioxide emissions from tourism is closely associated with transportation,storage industry,post,and telecommunication services.Besides,the carbon-dioxide emissions from tourism closely associated with dining,accommodation and shopping cannot be ignored.In general,there is considerable conflict between the increase of tourism income and the development of low-carbon tourism,hence the transformation of the development way of current tourism is urgently needed.