THE INVESTIGATION OF THE CARBON FOOTPRINT IN THE TOURISM SECTOR: THE SCENARIOS ANALYSIS OF FRENCH TOURISTS

Abstract

Tourism sector is a core economic factor to drive growth across the countries. This is the reason that tourism is responsible almost 8 percent of the world's carbon emissions based on the World tourism organization. Therefore, the relationship between tourism activity and carbon emission should be further explored. Since the emerging disease of Covid-19, the number of international tourists has significantly declined. Especially in France where it uses to be the top’s tourist destination, and tourism drive its national GDP. Then to promote the domestic travel is way for country to survive. Therefore, these inspired the research objectives including to identify the characteristics of the domestic trip in France concerning the transportation and accommodation generating the tourism sector's carbon footprint, and to propose productive solutions to minimize the amount of carbon footprint in the Tourism sector. As an extension of the consulting project, this study will use secondary data analysis technique to estimate the result of simulation trips and its scenarios. The four simulation trips that use in this study were completed by four French tourists, to represent the tourist behavior. This study stimulated nine more scenarios for each trip. At this point, one real actual trip is formulated together with different scenarios for comparison across the different scenarios. According to the results of these study reveal that there six main influential characteristics that impact the amount of Carbon footprint of domestic tourism in France including transportation mode, accommodation type, geographic scope, length of stay, distance travel and choice of destination. Therefore, to propose a practical solution to reduce the emission as a whole, many related stakeholders ranging from the tourists, the hotels and accommodations, business entrepreneurs and the government. This study recommends supporting slow tourism and responsible tourism, promote natural-based destination, select proper transportation mode and accommodation type to reduce the unnecessary carbon equivalent emission.