Page 270 - Çevre Şehir İklim İngilizce - Sayı 2

The Effect of Climate Change on Tourism

According to the air quality database updated by the World Health
Organization (WHO), since 2011, air pollution has increased around 6-fold
(WHO, 2022). This rate points to a serious increase in emissions, which in turn
reveals the urgency of contribution to climate action in tourism sector. This is
because the worsening of the climate change by tourism sector will lead to
short, medium and long-term negative impacts and damage on the sector.
Hereof, a series of suggestions were announced by WHO as a part of its
2020 One Planet Vision. These suggestions aim to render tourism sector
sustainable, preserve the sector from factors such as climate change and
especially COVID-19, increase sectoral flexibility, and create a suitable
atmosphere to meet the needs of the planet and to ensure its welfare. As a
part of One Planet Vision, it is suggested that tourism sector should support
the UN Sustainable Development Plans (SDP) (Figure 1) and the goals of Paris
Agreement. To this end, it is important to preserve biodiversity, take climate
action, adopt circular economy approach, and build a good governance and
funding infrastructure to achieve these goals (One Planet Sustainable Tourism
Programme, 2020: 5)

Figure 1. UN Sustainable Development Goals,
https://www.unwto.org/tourism-in-2030agenda (Accessed on 25.04.2022).
To this end, to support climate action in tourism sector, the relevant
solutions are given below (Roy, et al, 2018; One Planet Sustainable Tourism
Programme, 2020: 9):
• Tracking and reporting greenhouse gas emissions in all tourism
activities, and thus, identifying carbon-intensive tourism destinations
for the sake of achieving a climate-sensitive tourism sector and
making the investments accordingly.

Year 1 / Issue 2 / July 2022 256