The national tourism carbon emission inventory: its importance, applications and allocation frameworks

A credible national tourism emission inventory is a key to the effective carbon management of tourism activities. Currently, there are no guidelines that define the scope and boundaries for evaluating national tourism emissions and great variations exist in research methodologies, leading to confusion and misuse of these measures. This study compares four accounting frameworks, the Production Accounting Principle (PAP), the Kyoto Protocol Framework (KPF), the Consumption Accounting Principle (CAP) and the Tourism Satellite Account Principle (TSAP), for their concepts, calculations, attributions of responsibility and applications in serving different carbon management purposes. We argue that the TSAP inventory is the best framework to calibrate the full-scale environmental externality concerning internal tourism consumption; the PAP inventory is a comprehensive measure for monitoring territorial emissions and forms a base to apply abatement policies toward domestic producers, and the TSAP, PAP and CAP are all valid indicators that monitor the trade-off between economic output and GHGs. A case study of Taiwan is presented.