Transitioning tourism mobility

11/11/2025 - 15:25

The tourism industry has long been a driver of economic growth and cultural exchange. However, it is also one of the fastest-growing contributors to global carbon emissions. As the climate crisis reaches existential tipping points, the tourism sector continues to lag behind in its transition towards sustainability. Despite growing awareness, no country has successfully reduced its tourism-related emissions, raising urgent questions about how the industry can evolve while staying within planetary boundaries. Traditionally, sustainable tourism has been framed through a destination-focused lens, emphasising eco-friendly accommodation and local activities while largely ignoring the role of mobility. But the increasing travel distances and reliance on high-carbon transport - particularly aviation and private cars - are the real drivers of the sector’s growing emissions. While road and rail transport offer viable decarbonisation pathways, aviation remains one of the hardest sectors to transition to low-carbon alternatives. Long-haul travel has an outsized impact: just 20% of all tourism trips contribute to 80% of the sector’s emissions.
This raises critical questions about the future of tourism. If the sector is to become truly sustainable, there is a need to fundamentally rethink how and where people go while travelling on holidays.

Uncover

This article was written for Uncover magazine - Meaningful Leisure Experiences.

Author: Nina Nesterova is professor of Sustainable Development in Tourism and Transport at Breda University of Applied Sciences.

Centre for Sustainable Tourism and Transport (CSTT)
CSST has a clear ambition to contribute to this transition, working to reduce the climate footprint of tourism and leisure mobility. Our mission is to create meaningful change through research, consultancy, and education, supporting public authorities, industries, and society in embracing sustainable tourism practices. At the heart of our strategy is a vision for a just tourism mobility system - one that stays within planetary and societal boundaries while ensuring the economic sustainability of the sector. To achieve this, CSTT has developed a research programme organised in three main areas:

1. Reimagining tourism mobility
The current global tourism system relies heavily on aviation and car-based transport, making it unsustainable in the long run. Can we reimagine currently predominant travel habits and explore alternative mobility futures that serve society while reducing emissions? CSTT is working to help the industry move towards more localised, low-carbon tourism models that not only benefit the environment but also enhance well-being.

2. Navigating the transition
The shift towards sustainable tourism mobility is not just a technical challenge - it is a deeply political and social one. Governments, businesses, and tourists often have conflicting interests, which slows down necessary progress. What are the current paradoxes and barriers slowing down the transition? CSTT investigates these barriers and works on the strategies and tools to help industry overcome them, navigating productively through the transition.

3. Transforming tourism mobility in practice
To accelerate the transition to sustainable tourism, CSTT works on the deployment of concrete interventions, methodologies and tools. For example, we are one of the lead research partners within the INTERREG North-West MONA project (Modal shift, routing and nudging solutions in nature areas for sustainable tourism), where we assist European nature areas in the development of practical approaches encouraging tourists to shift from car to sustainable travel modes travelling to nature parks. Another example is an ongoing CELTH project: Destination RiskScan (Innovation for Tourism Destinations in a Warming World), where together with European partners we are developing an online climate risk scan to help destinations identify their risk profile and improve destination-level climate risk strategies. Additionally, through the European Sustainable Tourism Mobility Forum, which we organise every year, we aim to bring together tourism and transport stakeholders to foster productive dialogue and accelerate the transition towards sustainable tourism mobility.

In this way, CSTT’s research and initiatives aim to pave the way for a sustainable transition in tourism mobility, looking towards a future where tourism enriches people’s lives without costing the planet.