Tourism, Brexit and the climate crisis: on intersecting crises and their effects

Abstract

'Net-zero emissions' has emerged as a common international response to tackling a protracted global environmental crisis. Climate change has functioned, and continues to take place, simultaneously to other crises of different types, durations and geographical scales. While progress has been made in understanding tourism in climate change policy and vice versa, there has been very little work on how tourism features in approaches to addressing other major crises and how these may impact on climate change ambitions. This paper addresses this lacuna by examining how tourism features in concurrent UK government approaches to the climate crisis and to a political crisis, Brexit, between 2016 and 2019, with special reference to aviation as a major pivot between the two. Existing tourism studies have mainly focussed on environmental crises in isolation. This paper argues for greater investigation and consideration of the positioning, coincidence and interaction effects among different forms and scales of crises. Through the Tourism Sector Deal, tourism has been cast as a source of economic growth and resilience after Brexit but, heavily depending on aviation emissions, it has significant potential to confound the UK government's ambitions for net-zero Emissions.