Volume 2: Innovative Solutions for Energy Transitions: Part I

An Evaluation of the Effects of Tourism and Distributed Energy on Co-Development Jiehui Yuan*, Xunmin Ou

Abstract

Committed to green and low-carbon development, many countries like China is increasing its efforts to promote the development of its service economy such as tourism industries. Considering that tourism is an increasingly important contributor of energy consumption and pollutants emission, its green/low carbon development will play a significant role for China. Given the characteristics of renewable/green energy resources and tourism, a possible path is promoting the co-development of tourism and distributed energy which can create new economic growth points in addition to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and critical air pollutants (CAPs) compared to transitional development pattern. This study attempts to develop an evaluation framework to investigate the effects of the codevelopment of tourism and distributed energy. A typical tourism and distributed energy co-development project in Shenzhen which is a typical low-carbon development city is took as an example to demonstrate the application of the framework and related methods proposed to assess the benefit. The results indicate that the emission reduction effect is 0.5 thousand tonnes (Tt) of CAPs and 7.8 Tt of GHG in 2017. The proposed framework can effectively help China identify the effects of the co-development of tourism and distributed energy, which is helpful to formulate policy and implement actions for next step action aiming at promoting green/low-carbon development and ecological civilization construction.

Keywords green/low-carbon development, ecological civilization construction, tourism, renewable/green energy resources, co-development, benefits