Low-carbon tourism system in an urban destination

The current kind of isolated or reductionism research is incompetent to systematically manage the development of low-carbon tourism destination. This research takes Lhasa, a high-altitude tourist city, as the case study. In this study, we seek to establish a system dynamics model to explore the evolution characteristics of urban low-carbon tourism systems under different scenarios. Our results indicate that some decision parameters (such as the proportion of low-carbon investment, CO2 emissions per tourist, carbon intensity of other industries, CO2 emissions per resident, and travelling time) have the most significant impacts on the performance of low-carbon tourism system. Under the economic priority scenario, the environmental risks to low-carbon tourism system are controllable in the long run. The contribution of tourism development to the pollution levels is continuously increasing. The research process presented in this study could be applied to the systematic management of other low-carbon tourism cities and even larger-scale destinations.