Carbon Offsets

The terms carbon footprint and carbon offset have come to prominence as part of efforts to calculate and reduce greenhouse gas emissions that may contribute to negative environmental impacts. Early carbon offset practices go back to the late 1980s. One widely discussed example is the 1988 decision by the U.S. company Applied Energy Services to fund the planting of pine and eucalyptus trees in Guatemala to offset the emissions from its new coal-burning power plant in Connecticut.

Within the tourism industry, for a significant period of time, smokeless was a term loosely used to describe the tourism sector, to indicate that it was less destructive to the environment than other industries. However, in 2010, Bob McKercher, Bruce Prideaux, Catherine Cheung, and Rob Law suggested there is ...