Aviation’s climate impact allocated to inbound tourism: decision-making insights for “climate-ambitious” destinations

Abstract The climate impact from international aviation was 2.4% of the world’s total climate impact in 2018, and is expected to grow. International regulation of this impact is not aligned with trajectories to stay below 1.5 °C of global warming. Conventional approaches to allocating climate impact to international aviation also lack one of the important drivers for air travel: tourism. Existing studies have focused on the carbon footprint of residents’ outbound air travel, but there is a lack of focus on the climate impact from inbound air travel. This article quantifies the climate impact of inbound air travel, and presents it alongside the impact of outbound air travel, to get a full picture of the climate impact of tourism-driven air travel and provide insights for tourism’s decision-makers. This was done in a case study for Sweden. The results show that the emissions from inbound air travel have grown 3 times more than emissions from outbound air travel each year, at a faster rate than the yearly growth for all international air travel. Responsibility for the climate impacts of inbound and outbound air travel is discussed, along with further actions such as demarketing and focusing on closer source markets.