Jean-Paul Ceron

Voluntary Carbon Offsetting Schemes for Aviation: Efficiency, Credibility and Sustainable Tourism

Tourism is becoming increasingly dependent on air transport. Recent scientific work has pointed out the significant and growing contribution of air transport to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Obligations to reduce GHG emissions under the Kyoto Protocol and post-Kyoto instruments might make transport more expensive or even restricted in the future. This paper examines these questions and the issues raised by the increasing number of organisations offering voluntary carbon offsetting schemes as a means of compensating for emissions of GHGs, mostly from transport, which could help to stabilise or reduce emissions. There are substantial differences between the approaches chosen by these organisations in terms of their calculation of emissions, compensation measures, price levels, company structures and evaluation processes. The paper discusses these differences and their consequences for the efficiency and credibility of voluntary carbon offsetting schemes. Within this increasingly contested area, there is general agreement that increased clarity and regulation is required.

Tourism and Climate Change: Proposals for a Research Agenda

This paper explains the evolution of research into tourism and climate change, illustrating how early work concentrated on the impact of climate change on tourism, whereas current work also explores the impact of tourism on climate change. It goes on to elaborate a research agenda on both topics. The need to open up tourism research to other fields and professional worlds – such as climatology, the International Panel on Climate Change and transport research – is stressed, as is the need to organise the research community on a global basis, with more collaborative and comparative research.

Tourism and Sustainable Development Indicators: The Gap between Theoretical Demands and Practical Achievements

This paper outlines the historical context in which indicators appeared, and links this to the need for improving information systems. The conclusions are made with particular regard for emerging issues, the most recent of which is that of sustainable development. Owing to the rather low reliability of data and to the difficulty in defining the limits of tourism as an economic activity, articulating sets of sustainable development indicators (SDIs) appears to be even more difficult for tourism than for other industry sectors. Recent and current attempts show a great variety of methods and results. They relate in particular to • the various demands placed on the data, • the geographical scale to which the indicators refer and • the type of policy called upon to foster sustainable development: public policy, self-regulation, etc. The results indicate that a certain set of issues raised by sustainable development are privileged while others are left aside. This underscores the need to review the more theoretical aspects of sustainable development debates within practical attempts to build indicators.

The Potential Impacts of Climate Change on French Tourism

This paper deals with the potential effects of climate change on tourism in France. It examines the implications of a scenario by Météo-France (doubling the concentration of CO2) with regards to the climatic requirements of tourists, according to the different seasons, regions and natural resources on which tourism is based.