Susanne Becken

Griffith University · Griffith Institute for Tourism

The visitor economy is responsible for a substantial percentage of the global carbon footprint. The mechanisms used to decarbonize it are insufficient, and the industry is relying on carbon trading with substandard credits that allow businesses to outsource the responsibility to decarbonize. We aim to transform carbon markets, help finance climate...

Pro-sustainability changes are slow and incremental at best in the tourism sector. Research on the topic can take the form of secondary data (e.g., content analysis of strategic documents, social media posts), survey-based intent studies (e.g., willingness to pay), survey-based studies of self-reported behaviors, observation of actual behaviors (e....

Aviation is highly dependent on liquid fossil fuel, and the production of 'sustainable aviation fuels' (SAF) is being proposed as a solution to removing the fossil carbon component, especially for long-haul flights. An analysis of 12 aviation roadmaps for net zero 2050 reveals heavy reliance on biogenic SAF in the medium-term and synthetic e-kerose...

In the face of multiple crises, there is a pressing need to increase knowledge, skills and commitment to sustainability and climate action both amongst tourism practitioners and academics. There is an opportunity to deepen the concept of literacy in ways that not only capture operational aspects of tourism and carbon, but also embrace cultural and...

Decarbonising tourism is an immeasurable challenge but increasingly recognised as inevitable. This has prompted vast developments in theoretical models by academics and indicators by peak bodies to explore the pathways. One limitation to the pathways is the lack of emission data. This research presents a framework integrating the principles of TSA...

Understanding travel patterns is helpful for decision-makers to draw insights from consumers' perspectives. This work took advantage of social media and analysed tourists' travel patterns from the length of itineraries and duration of stay. Using Chinese tourists in Australia as a case study, results showed that most visitors prefer to stay in two...

This paper reviews tourism-relevant advances in climate science and tourism policy in the Australasia region over the past 20 years, focusing particularly on the seven years (2015–2021) since the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report. Within the Australasia region, Australia and New Zealand have a complicated relationship with climate change, as both countr...

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered worldwide lockdowns and mobility restrictions, which continue to impact the global tourism industry. Early discussions on restarting the tourism industry occurred in high uncertainty constant change, and apprehension amongst political leaders and the public. Therefore, understanding public emotions and reactions towa...

People provide information on their thoughts, perceptions, and activities through a wide range of channels, including social media. The wide acceptance of social media results in vast volume of valuable data, in variety of format as well as veracity. Analysis of such ‘big data’ allows organizations and analysts to make better and faster decisions....

The twin crisis of biodiversity loss and climate change make it urgent to find ways of restoring natural ecosystems, including coral reefs. Methods for coral reef restoration are rapidly advancing, bringing with them a range of potential risks and opportunities. Attention to public engagement in the governance of such activities therefore becomes c...

Understanding the perceptions of climate change by those working in tourism greatly supports development of adaptation measures in destinations. However, limited evidence of either perceptions or tourism adaptation measures is available from China. Building on protection motivation theory, this study explores how Chinese working in tourism perceive...

This paper introduces an innovative approach for assessing visitor satisfaction at the destination level by identifying attributes of interest from social media text and indirectly measuring performance and importance values. A lexicon-based method for sentiment analysis is applied to determine performance value at the destination level, while impo...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide contrasting narratives of what the future of Asia Pacific tourism may look like, and to identify how current policy interventions and recommendations made for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) recovery shape the system's trajectory. Design/methodology/approach Drawing on a set of four possible futu...

The COVID-19 pandemic provides an opportunity for tourism to change so to make a more meaningful contribution to sustainable development, including action on climate change. To achieve such a sustainable tourism transition, an effective enabling environment, supported through appropriate governance arrangements, is required, However, our understand...

Smart tech offers much promise for tourism recovery from the COVID-19 crisis and the broader issue of decarbonising tourism. This paper investigates how accommodation managers engaged with smart tech during the crisis, and the journey of learning how to use numerical data output to drive sustainability actions. Interviews with nine accommodation ma...

Growing concern about the climate crisis comes with increased scrutiny of flying as an emission-intensive activity. This study conceptualises a modern communication system and draws on social media data to examine pre-COVID-19 (September to December 2019) public conversations about aviation and climate change. The analysis of >326,000 Twitter posts...

Transformational system change is required to respond to the current climate emergency and the COVID-19 induced structural break presents an opportunity to progress such change. While the tourism industry accepts the need for change, how this may look like remains unclear. This article contributes to identifying pathways by presenting critical refl...

The COVID-19 pandemic alongside other environmental and social crises have raised questions around the role of government, governance and the notion of tourism value. The aim of this paper, therefore, was to develop a conceptual framework that makes sense of the tourism value discussion within the wider context of the New Zealand Department of Cons...

Purpose This paper aims to examine key parameters of scholarly context and geographic focus and provide an assessment of theoretical underpinnings of studies in the field of social media and visitor mobility. This review also summarised the characteristics of social media data, including how data are collected from different social media platforms...

Photo aesthetics assessment is a challenging problem. Deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based algorithms have achieved promising results for aesthetics assessment in recent times. Lately, few efficient and effective attention-based CNN architectures are proposed that improve learning efficiency by adaptively adjusts the weight of each patch d...

Social media opens up a great opportunity for policymakers to analyze and understand a large volume of online content for decision-making purposes. People’s opinions and experiences on social media platforms such as Twitter are extremely significant because of its volume, variety, and veracity. However, processing and retrieving useful information...

Air travel forms a substantial component of an organisation’s carbon profile, and questions around business travel are becoming more pertinent given the accelerating climate crisis. The current coronavirus pandemic, however, has effectively stopped much travel and organisations had to adapt by switching most interactions to online meetings. Drawing...

Effective climate change action relies on the production of relevant knowledge. This review provides an interdisciplinary meta-analysis to critically assess tourism and climate change knowledge production across three knowledge domains: academic, practical and political. Building on existing tourism knowledge frameworks and applying systems thinkin...

Coral reef systems are at the point where passive restoration measures may have to be complemented by active restoration to protect global reefs. No longer is habitat conservation enough with the level and frequency of reef disturbance. This review explores the ecosystem-based adaptation (EbA) approach of active coral restoration, with people at th...

Even before the global halt to extensive mobility due to the coronavirus crisis, there has been growing resistance amongst some groups to flying. Reflecting increasing concern about the imminent climate emergency, the phenomenon of feeling ashamed of flying and expressing related emotions through communication has resulted in the neologism “flygska...

Tourism is shaped by a wide range of factors and forces, including exogenous ones that have no direct link with the tourism sector. Natural disasters and unexpected events are prime examples of such determining factors, as they have profound effects on individuals and society, and as a result have the potential to affect tourism flows considerably....

Tourism is strongly interlinked with the natural and social environment, in particular in destinations around the Pacific. These environments are vulnerable to climate change which impacts on the social–ecological system of destinations. Ecosystem-based Adaptation (EbA) uses ecosystems to manage the risks of climate change. However, a gap remains i...

Purpose - Destination monitoring is crucial to understand performance and identify key points of differentiation. Visitor satisfaction is an essential driver of destination performance. With the fast growing volume of user-generated content through social media, it is now possible to tap into very large amounts of data provided by travellers as the...

Aesthetic values are a key driver of tourist and recreational visitation to natural areas and are listed among the selection criteria for World Heritage properties. However, assessment and monitoring of aesthetic values in natural areas, and coral reefs in particular, have proven to be challenging. In our study we explored the value and limitations...

Climate change poses complex challenges and addressing these requires increasing integration across policy domains. This research developed a framework to assess policy integration between the tourism and climate change domains by examining coverage, scope, materiality and alignment. A database of 101 policy documents was compiled, representing 61...

The adoption of renewable energy technology (RET) in the hotel sector is low, despite the technology's potential to reduce a hotel's energy consumption and carbon emissions. Previous research has explored selected aspects of RET adoption in hotels, but a comprehensive and systemic analysis is missing. This research uses a systems approach, which al...

Global air travel has reached 3.7 billion passengers in 2017 and is predicted to continue to grow at 4.7% per annum. Such forecasts fail to consider the rising cost of carbon and socio-economic declines due to climate change. Using three scenarios, this paper finds that air travel growth slows considerably, with the high mitigation scenario produci...

A boom in the availability of data provides a substantial opportunity for both researchers and practitioners to find new insights and previously unseen patterns from data, detect anomalies and also increase and improve levels of service to people. The use of big data is emerging in various fields of research, including in tourism. This chapter prov...

In March 2017, a category 4 cyclone, ‘Cyclone Debbie’, made landfall across the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) region of Australia. Drawing on the social amplification of risk framework and the concept of emotional stability, this research aims to provide insight into the perceptions of risk and individual responses to the disaster event using Twitter da...

The purpose of this research is to test the usefulness of eye-tracking in measuring the perceived beauty of photos of the Great Barrier Reef. Eye-tracking is used to measure visual attention (fixation count, fixation duration) to 21 photos ranked in the degree of perceived beauty. Results indicate significant differences in visual attention to ‘bea...

Tourists often travel to experience the natural beauty of a destination such as the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) in Australia. This nature-based destination attracts millions of tourists every year because of its outstanding underwater aesthetics. Recently, parts of the GBR have been degraded by warming sea temperatures and other local anthropogenic in...

This article consolidates the pros and cons of the two common modelling techniques for economic impact analysis: the input–output multiplier and the computable general equilibrium (CGE) technique. The latter is recommended for large event assessment and was used to examine the economic impacts of the Gold Coast 2018 Commonwealth Games. The Games is...

Including members of the public in the development of effective environmental monitoring systems is gaining traction. This research assesses the potential for a hybrid monitoring system for the case of coral at the Great Barrier Reef. Based on a review of citizen-derived data sources, the paper first develops a framework and then populates it with...

The tourism industry collectively seeks to portray itself as being proactive in embracing climate action, but is the sector doing enough to decarbonise to the extent agreed on in the Paris Agreement? This paper presents a constructive critique of the key mechanisms that presently define the global travel and tourism industry’s attempts to reduce gr...

Global tourism is booming, and so is demand for air travel. Recognising that travellers come with a carbon footprint increases the complexity of decision-making for destinations that seek to attract more visitors. The carbon risk inherent in travel to and from a destination could be substantial but current approaches of accounting and lack of trans...

The growing number of social media users and vast volume of posts could provide valuable information about the sentiment toward different locations, services as well as people. Recent advances in Big Data analytics and natural language processing often means to automatically calculate sentiment in these posts. Sentiment analysis is challenging and...

Progressing sustainable tourism requires both an innovative transition from “unsustainable” tourism and innovative research methods to develop theory and concepts for a sustainable tourism. While there are many ad hoc examples of initiatives, there are very few examples of firms systematically recording their medium-term evolutionary progress. This...

Ecosystem-based Adaptation (EbA) is increasingly being advocated as a climate adaptation approach that can deliver multiple benefits to communities. EbA scholarship argues that community-based projects can strengthen those ecosystems that deliver critical services to communities and in doing so enhance community resilience. In particular, the inclu...

This research experiment is the first study to provide detailed insights into resource use by guests staying in self-contained B&B style accommodation. Self-contained accommodation is a neglected yet important sub-industry in the hospitality sector, as it represents the largest and fastest growing share of accommodation providers in many regions. T...

In the international climate policy arena, it has become increasingly recognised that ecosystem-based approaches “can offer cost-effective, proven and sustainable solutions contributing to, and complementing, other national and regional adaptation strategies” (World Bank, 2009, p. 8). Ecosystem-based Adaptation (EbA) is often advocated as a particu...

The growing number of social media users and their posts provide valuable data about the sentiment that they have toward different services as well as people. Recent advances in big data analytics and natural language processing provided means to automatically calculate sentiment in text. Sentiment analysis is method which can be used to analyze so...

Mitigating tourism's emissions, in particular related to transportation is critical, to achieve the broader national emission reduction targets in developing countries. To gain a better understanding of the carbon emissions related to one of Chinese top destinations, and assess changes over time, this article analyses the travel patterns of both do...

A global challenge is dealing with the risk of envenomation by the stinging jellyfish. Those who are affected include: the people stung, tourist providers; diving and adventure operations, beach and park authorities, life guards, commercial marine operators as well as local and centralized government; we focus on tourism. There is a diversity of je...

Advances in technology have fundamentally changed how information is produced and consumed by all actors involved in tourism. Tourists can now access different sources of information, and they can generate their own content and share their views and experiences. Tourism content shared through social media has become a very influential information s...

This paper advances understanding of the complex and adaptive nature of indigenous Fijian communities involved in tourism. It examines how tourism-related development has set the people of one Fijian village along two separate development pathways, and explores how preferential access to tourism benefits has created disparities within the community...

Societies collapse when there is an increasing natural resource scarcity and growing stratification of society into rich and poor. The neoliberal world of targets, business plans and short term economic justification in which we live exacerbates these risks to society. It is imperative to find new ways of governing natural ecosystems that protect t...

Understanding the complex and adaptive nature of Pacific Island communities is a growing yet relatively unexplored area in the context of tourism development. Taking an ethnographic research approach, this study examines how over 40 years of tourism development have led to complex and multi-scale changes within an Indigenous Fijian village. The stu...

This chapter examines how tourism growth on Tanna Island could be guided sustainably, and what kinds of governance arrangements need to be in place to support this process. It also discuss the necessary monitoring and measuring frameworks that could be used to support a sustainable tourism growth plan, and the array of stakeholders who should be in...

The focus of this book is on the application and relevance of the concept of resilience to tourism. As well as summarizing the growth of the concept in the social sciences and tourism especially, this book illustrates: (i) the key elements involved in making the concept relevant to communities; (ii) the ways in which it can be used to enable commun...

Executive Summary The Great Barrier Reef (GBR) is a heavily visited area, with 2.2 million international and 1.7 million domestic visitors travelling to the region every year. In addition, about one million local residents live on the nearby coast. Both visitors and residents, to some extent, use social media to share content about their surroundin...

Despite preoccupation in the literature with tourism decline and rejuvenation there is limited research and theoretical frameworks to understand the impact a dominant resources sector has on tourism and its ability to rejuvenate. Grounded in transformation theory, this research explores the mechanisms of change within two resource sector dependent...

This paper seeks to understand the complex values held by those involved in Protected Area and World Heritage stewardship. Using IUCN Protected Area categories, a values framework is developed and applied to demonstrate how values guide stewardship in protected areas. In-depth interviews with key tourism operators, public sector managers and other...

Tourism is inherently dependent on weather and climate, and its sustainability and resilience to adverse weather and climate impacts is greatly enhanced by providing tailored climate services to tourism sector stakeholders. Climate services need to integrate standard weather forecasts, with early warning systems, seasonal forecasts and long term pr...

Current climate change policy and sustainable tourism goals require tourist accommodation to make substantial resource savings. This integrated energy and water systematic literature review analysed 110 key papers that contribute to understanding savings potentials and new opportunities. Findings identify substantial gaps that suggest that there is...

The water-energy nexus is critical to solving multiple resource challenges simultaneously, but has rarely been considered in tourism, despite evidence that tourism can be both energy and water intensive. A database of 876 environmentally certified hotels globally was used to explore the resource use, savings achievements and existence of different...

The current growth in Chinese outbound tourism is phenomenal, yet relatively little research has paid heed to issues related to how Chinese tourists overcome challenges before and during their trips. This study surveyed 463 Chinese tourists in Queensland, Australia to explore Chinese outbound tourists’ levels of general and travel planning self-eff...

Unsustainable consumption of energy and water by tourist accommodation will escalate if incremental global tourism growth and business-as-usual approaches continue. Guests use more than half of the energy and water at accommodation facilities and so have a partnership role to play in saving resources. Our study is the first to measure the impact of...

The global tourism industry has benefited from exceptional growth; however, a number of challenges have the potential to seriously undermine the industry's future aspirations. This research uses social representation theory to understand how the social group of tourism experts makes sense of the phenomena of “tourism growth”, “low-carbon tourism”,...

Tourism is often heralded as a force for peace, however, empirical research to confirm this suggestion is scant. To address this gap, this research integrates several datasets on conflict and tourism to examine whether a larger inflow of tourists makes civil conflict less likely. Several theoretical arguments of the role of tourism alongside other...

Purpose This paper aims to investigate weather sensitivity of tourism businesses in New Zealand to examine whether adaptive responses and “learning” about current weather can help operators to prepare more proactively for future climatic changes. Design/methodology/approach This paper draws on data from interviews with 57 tourism operators and sta...

This research note provides an evaluation of tourism and Disaster Risk Reduction approaches within the context of Northland, New Zealand. A stakeholder-driven evaluation approach that explicitly recognised multiple values was undertaken to evaluate the policy implementation process, benefits perceived, and improvement potentials. A mixed approach o...

Inbound tourist arrivals into China have been declining in recent years, possibly in response to increasing levels of urban air pollution. To examine Westerners’ contemporary views on China as a travel destination, with a particular focus on air pollution, this research surveyed 600 US and Australian residents. An online panel survey collected data...

Increasing environmental performance in tourism is of critical importance. Supporting accommodation and food providers in the implementation of resource efficiency measures helps reduce utility costs and leads to a range of other benefits. A subset of the Flash Eurobarometer data (N = 601) is used to investigate resource efficiency measures now and...

This book is the first to examine oil constraints and tourism, and addresses one of the key challenges for the tourism industry in the future. It provides an estimate of how much oil tourism consumes globally and summarises state-of-the-art information on oil resources, oil data and public discourse. The volume also offers an analysis of the econom...

This article describes a research agenda for investigating the relationship between tourism and the Chinese Dream, informed by the G20 First East-West Dialogue on Tourism and the Chinese Dream held in late 2014 on Australia’s Gold Coast. Six themes comprise this agenda, including (1) clarification of the “Chinese Dream” construct, (2) connections b...

Peak Oil, the peaking of global oil production, is a collective risk highly relevant to the tourism sector. Public discourse on Peak Oil, however, is limited. To better understand what “sense” tourism experts make of Peak Oil, and provide a platform for future debate and action, this research used the theory of social representation to explore core...

Shani and Arad (2014) claimed that tourism scholars tend to endorse the most pessimistic assessments regarding climate change, and that anthropogenic climate change was a “fashionable” and “highly controversial scientific topic”. This brief rejoinder provides the balance that is missing from such climate change denial and skepticism studies on clim...

This final response to the two climate change denial papers by Shani and Arad further highlights the inaccuracies, misinformation and errors in their commentaries. The obfuscation of scientific research and the consensus on anthropogenic climate change may have significant long-term negative consequences for better understanding the implications of...

Shani and Arad (2014) claimed that tourism scholars tend to endorse the most pessimistic assessments regarding climate change, and that anthropogenic climate change was a “fashionable” and “highly controversial scientific topic”. This brief rejoinder provides the balance that is missing from such climate change denial and skepticism studies on clim...