In Baku, Azerbaijan, this week, the travel industry will have its first official day ever at the annual United Nations climate talks. At COP29, as this year’s conference is known, Wednesday has been set as a “thematic day on tourism,” and there will be high-level meetings and roundtables devoted to the tourism industry’s effects on the environment and climate change and how they might be mitigated.
Helping to frame the discussion will be the Glasgow Declaration on Climate Action in Tourism, which was introduced by the U.N.’s World Tourism Organization at the 2021 conference to nudge the travel industry toward a more environmentally friendly future.
The declaration, originally signed by more than 300 travel companies, nonprofit organizations and government agencies, and now counting more than 900 signatories, was supposed to “secure strong actions and commitment from the tourism sector” and “accelerate climate action.” Participating travel organizations would disclose greenhouse gas emissions; take steps to decarbonize; restore and protect natural ecosystems; and collaborate to ensure best practices.
There were two core commitments. Within 12 months of signing the accord, entities would create and submit a public “climate action plan” that outlined specific actions they would take to reduce emissions. And second, signatories would halve their emissions before 2030, in order to get on track to reach net zero emissions by 2050.
How have they done?
Well, it’s a start. While many experts agree that the Glasgow Declaration was an important and necessary first step, few tourism organizations have signed on and those that did haven’t always followed through with their promises. Global emissions, meanwhile, are still on the rise.
“The Glasgow Declaration sparked a tremendous response across travel and tourism,” said Julia Simpson, the president and chief executive of the World Travel and Tourism Council, a nonprofit organization of travel businesses and a signatory of the declaration. “What the world needs now is measurable action — and there’s no time to lose.”
On the eve of tourism’s day at COP29, here are key issues that remain unresolved.
Signatories pledged to halve emissions, but efforts are hard to quantify.
Recent studies suggest that tourism is responsible for at least 8 percent of the world’s carbon emissions, according to the W.T.T.C., and global emissions on the whole continue to increase, hitting a record in 2023. While individually some of the signatories have begun to shrink their own carbon footprints, there is no broad evidence as yet that the travel industry’s emissions have diminished.
The nature of the travel industry, the new bookkeeping and a short time frame have contributed to the lack of quantifiable results. The organizations that signed on to halve their emissions are of different sizes, with different emission amounts, and base lines of the amounts of gases emitted were either not established before the declaration or varied. And they still have time: 2030 is six years away, so any requirement in reporting emission-level reductions has not yet hit the deadline.
The signatories represent a minuscule number of entities.
The signatories are large and small — hotels, local governments, travel agencies and others — and range from big names like Expedia Group and Radisson Hotels to location-specific groups, like the Great Himalaya Trail and Dallas Fort Worth International Airport. But the vast majority of tourism players haven’t signed on.
In a forthcoming article about the declaration in the Journal of Sustainable Tourism, the authors — Daniel Scott, a professor of climate change at the University of Waterloo in Canada, and Stefan Gössling, a professor of tourism research at Linnaeus University in Sweden — found that only 65 out of 530,000 worldwide travel agencies have signed on. Similarly, only 117 accommodations providers are signatories out of the 29 million providers listed through Booking.com.
Most of the biggest emitters haven’t signed on.
According to a study published last week by the Global Carbon Budget project and the University of Exeter, international aviation emissions are projected to increase by 14 percent this year, compared to 2023.
These emissions are the industry’s largest contributing factor to climate change, yet major aviation companies have not signed onto the Glasgow Declaration.
“What airline could credibly sign up for minus-50 percent by 2030?” Mr. Scott wrote in an email. Similarly, most cruise lines — another major industry in the travel world — have steered clear of the declaration.
Most signatories haven’t published a climate action plan.
The majority of organizations that did sign on have not yet published climate action plans, which are the essential roadmaps for reaching emission goals, according to the forthcoming article in the Journal of Sustainable Tourism.
The authors found that as of September 2024, only 28 percent of signatories had submitted a plan within the required 12 months. In other words, nearly three-fourths of the entities haven’t delivered what they promised.
“Even these sectoral leaders need to improve their disclosure practices to be considered credible by the international community,” the authors wrote.
There’s no enforcement.
The Glasgow Declaration “lacks legal footing in most countries,” said Dallen J. Timothy, professor of community resources and development at Arizona State University. It falls, he said, as “more an environmental justice action, rather than a legal measure.”
Jeremy Sampson, chief executive of the nonprofit Travel Foundation and one of the drafters of the Glasgow Declaration, urged patience on the accountability front.
“We’re not at the point of policing people when we still need to be getting everyone on board with climate literacy,” he said.
But Mr. Sampson said he’s proud of the declaration’s impact, saying the Glasgow accord paved the way to COP29.
“Have we made significant progress? I think it’s fair to say that we have,” he said. “Now, here we are with this tourism day in Baku, where tourism is part of the climate conversation and has a role to play.”
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