CO2 calculation – a part of future market planning?

Innovation Norway has, under the mandate of serving the tourism sector of Norway in their business and market development, launched “CO2rism”. A tool for calculating the CO₂-emissions caused by transport of tourists to and in Norway.

The user groups of this calculator are businesses and destinations marketeers, interested in insight on the emissions caused by the guests they want to attract.

“We are now able to judge both the potentially tourist consumption and the CO2-emissions by combining our tourist consumption calculator with the new calculator on CO2-emissions. We want to provide better data to support strategic work like market priorities”, says Bente Bratland Holm, Director of Tourism at Visit Norway, part of Innovation Norway.

Estimating transport-related direct CO2-emissions

World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) projected in 2019 the share of transport emissions related to tourism to increase towards 2030 (UNWTO 2019). The current COVID-19 pandemic situation involves strong short-term implications for travelling and probably also, longer-term consequences for travel. The calculator would be well suited to e.g. calculate the change in emissions due to the changes in tourism imposed from this.

“With tourism being an important economic industry and making a large contribution to both global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and anthropogenic emissions, it is of key importance to understand the CO2 emission differences between tourist markets and their places of destination and by their modes of transport”, says Henrik Grythe, researcher at Norwegian Institute of Air Research, appointed to deliver input data for the calculator.

How it works

• The calculator targets specific tourist markets, or country of origin, travelling to specific regions in Norway.
• The whole journey is split in three parts: the international, regional and local distances.
• The users of the calculator have multiple choices to adjust the input data according to their tourist numbers, the length of the stay, and origin markets.
• The calculator covers 6 different transport modes: aviation, ferries, trains, cars, bus and campers. The transport emissions of each transport mode are distributed to the tourist based on the number of passengers that share the emissions.
• The resulting output is a statistical measure of tourist travelers' emissions travelling to, from and at a destination, based on the place of origin, destination region and length of stay of the tourist.
• The input data covers both leisure and business travel.