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Abstract |
The climate crisis is one of the greatest challenges of our time. Tourism can also make an important contribution to solving these problems (Lenzen et al. 2018). Nature-based tourism is thereby of particular importance. This is especially because it is generally viewed as a more ecological version compared to other forms of tourism. Nature-based tourism offers a lot of experience in the field of sustainable development. In addition, it represents a growth in tourism worldwide (Haukeland et al. 2021). It is now a matter of further developing this form of tourism into a zero impact nature-based tourism.In 2015, as part of the Paris Climate Agreement, the international community decided to limit the average global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial times, with a target of 1.5 degrees Celsius increase in temperature in order to prevent the most catastrophic damage to the climate (IPCC 2018). In the wake of the Paris Climate Agreement, numerous countries have announced that they want to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050 at the latest. These climate goals result in a special challenge for tourism, which contributes significantly to global warming with its greenhouse gas emissions on a global level as well as in individual countries (Loeh, Becken 2021).For tourism as a whole, the question arises as to which function it should play within the framework of the internationally established net zero goal. On a global scale, climate-damaging air traffic represents the greatest challenge for the tourism industry: Will tourism have to cope with significantly fewer flight kilometres in the future? How can the long-distance tourists that are no longer available in the destinations of the global south be replaced? Or will drive technologies for aircrafts be developed in the future that are climate-neutral? At a regional level of tourist destinations, too, a number of extremely relevant fields of action are affected with regard to climate protection. Mobility also plays a central role here, but there are also major challenges for the hotel industry and other areas with high greenhouse gas emissions (Gössling 2021). |
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