Two weeks ago an important paper was published in the Journal of Travel Research. The paper offers a dialogue between climate science, policy and justice in tourism. In doing so it reveals why science alone is not enough to address the complexity of climate change in tourism.
Transcript
James: The starting point for this paper is that we know a great deal about climate change and tourism. Tourism scholars have been researching and publishing on the subject of climate change since the mid-late 1980s. Their research has served the purpose of advancing policy conversations at the national and international levels. In 2024 the COP29 conference programme included a dedicated tourism session for the first time. So it could be argued that progress is being made – albeit frustratingly slow.
But when you step back – even in 2026 – it is clear that hard questions and answers are still largely missing from the conversation. It is the hard questions that this paper seeks to identify and address.
Climate change is no longer a distant prospect for tourism. It is happening now and it is intensifying. Destinations are being impacted. Ecosystems are degrading. Livelihoods are under threat. Tourists are being disrupted. Demand patterns are shifting. Lives are being put at risk.
The central argument in this paper is that climate science and climate policy must be integrated with questions of climate justice, which need to sit at the centre of how we think about tourism and climate change.
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The lead author of the paper is my colleague Dr. Raymond Rastegar, who joins me today. Welcome to the Checking-In podcast Raymond.
James: So why this paper, and why now?
Raymond: Tourism research has produced a vast body of knowledge on climate impacts, adaptation strategies, and mitigation options. We know that weather variability affects visitor numbers, that sea-level rise threatens island destinations, and that extreme heat is driving seasonal wildfires that are life threatening and costly in human and industry terms.
We also know that policy discussions are taking place. The Glasgow Declaration on Climate Action in Tourism has encouraged decarbonisation efforts. COP meetings increasingly reference the sector. National governments are being asked to include tourism in their climate commitments.
Yet despite all of this, we identify in the paper a persistent and troubling gap. Very little attention has been given to some of the most fundamental questions:
- Who is responsible for the tourism emissions that are driving climate change?
- Who is most vulnerable to climate change in tourism — and why?
- Who benefits from the current tourism system?
- And who bears the costs of the high emissions produced by tourism?
The paper’s core argument is that climate change is fundamentally a global environmental problem but it is also a social and ethical problem. Until justice becomes part of the conversation as a central analytical lens our responses to climate change in tourism will remain incomplete.
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James: To try to tackle this incompleteness requires that a high degree is complexity is addressed in the scope of a single paper. That is not easy. So you brought together a team of authors to work together on the paper. We should introduce listeners to the authors and explain their expertise across the three domains that we wanted to integrate in the paper.
Raymond: That’s right James. The authorship team is made up of colleagues and collaborators working together in the field of tourism and climate change. Our climate science insights were informed by Prof. Daniel Scott from the University of Waterloo in Canada and Associate Professor Ya-Yen Sun from the University of Queensland. Dan’s research examines climate change and the global tourism sector and he is a long-standing contributor to IPCC assessment reports. Ya-Yen’s research addresses tourism sustainability through economic impact analysis and environmental footprinting. She is conducted research on tourism emissions measurement at the global and national levels.
James: Our second key domain, climate policy, draws on the expertise of our Griffith University colleagues Prof. Susanne Becken and Dr. Johanna Loehr, both of whom are leading researchers in the Griffith Institute for Tourism – Climate Change Action cluster. Susanne’s research addresses, among other things, sustainable tourism, energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, tourist behaviour, and environmental policy. Johanna’s research focus falls upon tourism and climate change – and systems thinking – with particular attention to climate adaptation and climate policy.
Raymond: In recent years I have worked closely to advance the field climate justice in tourism with Prof. Lisa Ruhanen at the University of Queensland and Dr. Freya Higgins-Desbiolles at the University of South Australia. Lisa’s research spans Indigenous tourism and destination policy, planning and governance. Freya is a critical tourism scholar whose work focuses on justice and human rights. She has particular interests in Indigenous tourism, the rights of host communities, and the politics of tourism.
Together these authors provided the research expertise required to bring together a piece of writing on why – in our collective view – science alone is not enough to address the complexity of climate change in tourism.
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James: The paper’s central argument is that we need three distinct conversations – climate science, climate policy and climate justice – to work together. At the moment, they largely operate in isolation. The first is climate science.
Raymond: Climate science seeks to explains what is actually happening to the climate system. It measures impacts, models future scenarios, and tells us about the physical risks and thresholds we are approaching. Climate science has been foundational to everything we know about tourism’s exposure to climate change. It has confirmed, for example, that 2024 was the first year global average temperatures exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. And current national policy settings are on track for approximately 3 degrees of warming by 2100. This level of warming is associated with the collapse of ecosystems, food and water insecurity, and hundreds of millions of displaced people.
James: The second conversation is climate policy. This is where science gets translated into governance. In theory, effective governance should translate climate science into targets, regulations, adaptation mechanisms, and institutional responses. COP summits, the Paris Agreement, and national climate legislation are all part of the policy domain. The challenge is that policy processes are shaped by politics, by powerful interests, and by institutional inertia. Tourism has historically been largely or entirely absent from national climate commitments. And when policy does engage with the sector, it tends to favour technocratic and market-based solutions that leave deeper structural questions unaddressed.
Raymond: The third conversation is climate justice which addresses the ethical and political dimensions of climate change. Justice scholarship asks whether our responses to climate change are actually fair. It asks whose knowledge is counted, who gets to participate in decisions, and how benefits and burdens are distributed. It brings into view the stark reality that those least responsible for tourism’s carbon emissions are often the most exposed to its consequences.
The key message of the paper is that climate decisions must require all three of these perspectives to be aligned. Science without justice produces technically sophisticated but inequitable solutions. Policy without justice produces frameworks that privilege powerful actors. And justice without science or policy risks offering a moral critique without the tools to change anything on the ground.
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Raymond: To make these ideas concrete, the paper uses global aviation as a case study. Aviation is the single largest source of emissions across the tourism system. It is also a site where the tensions between science, policy, and justice in tourism are clearly visible.
James: The science of aviation has confirmed that air travel is a deeply problematic sector. We now know that a small number of very frequent flyers – approximately 1% of the global population – generate half of total global aviation emissions. Meanwhile, we also know that the vast majority of the world’s population rarely flies or has never flown at all. Per-capita tourism emissions differ by a factor of over one hundred between the richest and poorest populations globally. There are deep structural inequalities that are embedded in aviation. The science has made clear that demand growth and emissions growth are inseparable under the current technical regime. And that despite industry rhetoric, there is no clear pathway to a low- or zero-emissions aviation future.
The policy response to this has been, to put it charitably, totally inadequate. The International Civil Aviation Organisation’s approach prioritises technological optimism. It has focussed on sustainable aviation fuels, carbon offsetting schemes, and net-zero aspirational goals, rather than confronting the fundamental problem of demand growth. Sustainable aviation fuels come with their own serious concerns: biodiversity loss, land-use competition with food production, and the use of renewable energy that could decarbonise other sectors faster and more effectively. Meanwhile, carbon offsetting has failed to deliver real emissions reductions, while enabling continued high-emissions behaviour.
Raymond: The justice dimensions of aviation are also deeply problematic. Small island states like the Maldives, the Seychelles and many low-lying Pacific Island microstates face an impossible dilemma. International tourism is a key pillar of their economies. But international tourism means aviation and therefore high emissions. We know that aviation emissions are contributing to the sea-level rise that threatens the very islands that depend on visitors arriving by plane. These countries have contributed almost nothing to historical emissions but are facing the existential threat of climate change. Under current governance frameworks, they bear the responsibility of navigating this contradiction entirely on their own.
This is why the paper argues that simply reducing emissions is not enough. We need to ask: whose emissions? Reduced by whom? And who compensates the communities carrying the costs of a system they did not create?
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James: It is easy to talk about justice in abstract terms but this paper tries to explore what climate justice actually requires in tourism.
Raymond: Climate justice in tourism requires us to ask and respond to the hard questions. Are the people most vulnerable to climate change being seen and acknowledged in our research and our policy frameworks? This includes tourism workers who may be migrants who are employed informally, exposed to extreme heat, with poor working conditions and employment rights. It includes Indigenous communities whose cultural landscapes underpin tourism economies, and who bear disproportionate burdens while having negligible contributions to global emissions. It includes the populations of Small Island Developing States that facing existential threats from sea-level rise.
Justice also requires procedural fairness This means that affected communities must actually participate in the decisions that shape their futures. At the moment, the institutions governing global tourism and aviation are dominated by powerful states and industry interests. Local governments, destination communities, workers, and Indigenous peoples are largely excluded from these processes. A genuinely just governance framework would look very different.
Distributive justice also draws attention to the fact that the costs and benefits of tourism’s climate response need to be shared fairly. A uniform carbon tax, for example, may sound equitable, but it places the same burden on an occasional traveller from a low-income country and a frequent-flying executive from a wealthy country. Progressive instruments such as levies that increase with the number of flights taken may better reflect actual responsibility.
The paper also raises the question of future generations. The cumulative greenhouse gas emissions being generated by today’s aviation growth will reshape the climate conditions – and therefore the travel opportunities – available to people in the future. This intergenerational dimension of justice is largely absent from current policy debates, but we argue in the paper that it can no longer be ignored.
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James: The paper identified four concrete priorities that are required to move the field forward. The first is embedding justice within climate modelling and vulnerability assessment.
Raymond: Most existing models treat vulnerability as a technical category. That is a measure of exposure and adaptive capacity. But vulnerability is not just a biophysical condition. It is also the product of social and economic inequalities, colonial histories, labour precarity, and intersecting systems of disadvantage. Future modelling needs to be disaggregated enough to capture these realities, rather than treating populations as homogeneous units.
The second priority is moving beyond top-down governance. Democratic participation in climate decision-making is not a ‘nice-to-have’. It is, we argue in the paper, a prerequisite for justice. This means taking Indigenous knowledge systems, community-led adaptation, and the voices of workers and local residents seriously – as genuine participants in shaping outcomes.
James: The third priority is confronting the growth assumption. This is perhaps the most challenging of the four. Almost all mainstream tourism and aviation policy continues to treat growth as the default setting. The question being asked is ‘how can we reduce emissions while continuing to grow’? We argue that this perspective needs to change to ‘what kinds of tourism futures are actually socially just, ecologically sustainable, and politically viable under accelerating climate change’? Those futures may look quite different from the high-volume, aviation-dependent model that we have created.
The fourth priority is advancing transformative and locally grounded approaches. This means investing in community-led climate action, supporting Indigenous ecological stewardship, and taking seriously the idea that climate solutions cannot be imposed from above. This resonates strongly with the regenerative tourism frameworks we have discussed in earlier episodes of the Checking In podcast. This argues the case for models in which tourism is understood as a set of relationships and responsibilities, not simply as a set of market transactions.
James: So what is the primary audience for this paper in your view? Who do you most want to read and heed this paper?
Raymond: I hope the paper reaches a wide audience. Of course, we want researchers to build on these ideas and further explore climate justice in tourism, but we also hope it resonates with policymakers, destination managers, tourism businesses, and anyone involved in planning for climate change.
The main message is that climate change is not just an environmental or economic issue, it is also a justice issue. As destinations adapt to a warmer future, we need to ask not only what solutions work, but who benefits, who bears the costs, and whose voices are included in those decisions. If this paper encourages more people to ask those questions, then I think it has achieved its purpose.
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James: Climate science tells us what is happening. The evidence is overwhelming and the urgency to change the climate change trajectory is real. Climate policy sets targets, builds governance frameworks, and attempts to translate scientific knowledge into action. Both are critically important.
Raymond: But climate justice asks questions that neither science nor policy can answer. Under current settings climate science and climate policy safeguard the interests of frequent flyers, wealthy destinations, and countries with the capacity to access green finance and implement sophisticated adaptation strategies.
They fail to adequately recognise those who are most vulnerable – tourism workers in low-income countries, island communities facing sea-level rise, Indigenous peoples whose traditional lands and cultures remain largely or entirely unprotected in the face of climate change.
James: The future of a sustainable tourism sector depends on changing this. Not just by reducing emissions (although that is obviously essential and remains an enormous challenge) but by building a system in which the benefits and burdens of tourism are understood, recognised and accommodated in climate policy.
Raymond: This requires a commitment to meaningful dialogue between climate science, climate policy, and climate justice in tourism. Which is exactly what this paper seeks to advance.
Reference
Rastegar, R., Higham, J. E. S., Becken, S., Scott, D., Sun, Y.-Y., Higgins-Desbiolles, F., Loehr, J., & Ruhanen, L. (2026). A dialogue between climate science, policy, and justice in tourism. Journal of Travel Research, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1177/00472875261459206
