Assessing International Tourism's Global Environmental Impact of Food and Beverages

Abstract

Tourism harms the environment in many ways and agriculture is of particular importance because of a wide range of negative impacts, the specific spatial conditionality of tourists' consumption, and the change in their eating habits during travel. Despite the urgency of previous research, the environmental requirements of tourist consumption have not yet been quantified. The main aim of the paper is thus quantify in the long term the total amount of food consumed in international tourism and assess its environmental impacts: land use, water requirements, and emitted emissions. Furthermore, we deal with the projection of these impacts associated with meat consumption up to 2050. The investigation uses long-term secondary data on the number of tourists, national diets, and environmental requirements of foodstuffs. According to our research, 15.6 million tonnes of food was consumed globally in 2010 and this amount increased to 24.5 in 2019. Due to COVID-19, the amount decreased by 72%. Although vegetal foodstuffs account for a larger share of the total, the environmental requirements are primarily associated with animal foodstuffs. Compared to daily at-home eating, tourists’ consumption patterns, e.g., higher preference for meat or whole grains, increase the environmental requirements by more than 10%. This research serves destination management bodies and concludes that the food environmental impacts should be the subject of adequate measures that would mitigate them and would make tourism more sustainable.