How consumerism affects the pursuit of sustainable tourism

Why consumerism matters to sustainable tourism

Sustainable tourism is often discussed through visible operational changes: more efficient buildings, lower-waste hospitality, better public transport, conservation measures and improved destination management. Those interventions can be valuable, but they answer only part of the sustainability question. Tourism is also a form of consumption, and demand determines how many journeys, hotel nights, meals, attractions, purchases and transport movements occur. If total demand grows quickly, reductions in impact per trip may be outweighed by the larger number or greater intensity of trips.

That tension sits at the centre of Freya Higgins-Desbiolles’s 2010 article, published in Tourism and Hospitality Research. The article uses sociologist Leslie Sklair’s concept of the culture-ideology of consumerism to ask why sustainability remains difficult despite decades of sustainable-tourism discussion. In the paper’s own framing, consumerism is not simply the individual choice to buy souvenirs or book a holiday. It is a wider value system in which consumption, market participation and continuing economic expansion are treated as normal routes to wellbeing and social progress.

The article goes further and argues that neoliberalism and its associated consumer culture are inherently unsustainable. That is a normative and theoretical claim made by the author, not a universally established conclusion. Researchers disagree about how far market growth can be reconciled with environmental limits, and policy approaches range from green-growth strategies to post-growth and degrowth proposals. The value of the 2010 paper is therefore less that it settles this debate than that it identifies a question operational sustainability can miss: what happens when cleaner tourism still depends on ever more tourism?

Efficiency is not the same as reducing total impact

Efficiency measures aim to reduce the resources or emissions associated with a unit of activity. A hotel can use less electricity per guest-night, an aircraft can burn less fuel per passenger-kilometre, and a destination can improve water reuse or waste management. These changes matter because they can lower the intensity of tourism. But intensity and total impact are different quantities: total impact reflects both the footprint of each unit and the overall volume of units consumed.

Empirical carbon-footprint research makes this distinction concrete. Lenzen and colleagues estimated that tourism’s global carbon footprint increased from 3.9 to 4.5 gigatonnes of carbon-dioxide equivalent between 2009 and 2013, accounting for about 8% of global greenhouse-gas emissions in their analysis. They concluded that rapidly increasing tourism demand was outpacing decarbonisation in tourism-related technologies. The study did not test Freya Higgins-Desbiolles’s cultural argument directly, but it documented the kind of aggregate outcome her analysis warned could occur.

A broader 2024 Nature Communications study by Sun and colleagues extended global tourism-footprint analysis to 175 countries. It estimated that tourism emissions rose by 3.5% per year from 2009 to 2019, reaching 5.2 gigatonnes of carbon-dioxide equivalent in 2019. Over the same period, the study found technology-related efficiency gains of only about 0.3% per year, while tourism demand grew much faster. In its decomposition, rising consumption was the largest global driver of the emissions increase.

These results do not prove that a consumerist ideology caused the growth in tourism emissions. They do, however, support a narrower factual point: efficiency gains can coexist with rising total emissions when demand expands more quickly. That distinction is essential when evaluating sustainability claims. A business or destination may report credible improvements per visitor while the system around it moves in the opposite direction at aggregate scale.

What the 2010 article changes in the sustainability question

The 2010 paper reframes sustainability from a technical-management problem into a question about values, institutions and definitions of success. A conventional management approach can ask how to accommodate projected growth with fewer impacts. Freya Higgins-Desbiolles asks whether continual growth itself should remain an unquestioned objective. The shift matters because it changes what counts as a solution: the discussion moves from making each unit of tourism cleaner to considering limits, sufficiency, distribution and alternative forms of prosperity.

This line of thinking later became more visible in tourism scholarship on degrowth and overtourism. Hall’s 2009 discussion of steady-state tourism distinguished qualitative development from aggregate quantitative growth. A 2019 conceptual article by Freya Higgins-Desbiolles and colleagues argued that tourism degrowth should pay close attention to social equity and the rights of local communities, rather than treating lower visitor numbers as an end in themselves. Fletcher and co-authors similarly reviewed tourism degrowth as an emerging research and policy agenda.

These authors do not all make identical arguments, and degrowth remains contested. Critics can reasonably ask how lower tourism volumes would affect jobs, public revenue, small businesses and destinations that depend heavily on visitors. Supporters respond that dependence on continuous growth can itself create vulnerability and can shift environmental or social costs onto residents. The debate therefore concerns both ecological limits and the distribution of benefits, costs and decision-making power.

Operational sustainability still matters

A critique of consumerism does not imply that operational improvements are pointless. Energy efficiency, renewable electricity, rail and public transport, water conservation, waste prevention, habitat protection and better tourism planning can all reduce impacts relative to less efficient alternatives. The 2005 policy guide on sustainable tourism produced by the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Tourism Organization set out a broad policy approach that included economic viability, local prosperity, employment quality, social equity, visitor fulfilment, local control, community wellbeing, cultural richness, physical integrity, biological diversity, resource efficiency and environmental purity.

That multidimensional framing is useful because tourism sustainability is not only about carbon. High visitor concentrations can affect waste systems, freshwater demand, land use, biodiversity, housing, congestion and residents’ access to public space. The importance of any one pressure varies by destination. A remote island with limited water and waste capacity faces different constraints from a city with strong public transport or a rural region where tourism supports conservation funding and livelihoods.

The consumerism argument adds another layer rather than replacing these tools. It asks decision-makers to test whether improvements are absolute or merely relative. If a destination cuts water use per guest-night by 20% but guest-nights rise by 40%, total water demand can still increase. If aviation becomes more fuel-efficient while flight demand rises faster, total fuel use can remain difficult to reduce. The arithmetic does not determine the policy response, but it shows why volume belongs in the sustainability assessment.

This is also why rebound effects matter in tourism. When travel becomes cheaper, faster or more efficient, some of the saving can be converted into additional journeys, longer distances or more spending. The size of that response varies and cannot be assumed in every case, but the mechanism shows why technical efficiency does not automatically translate into an equal reduction in total resource use. Sustainable-tourism policy therefore has to ask what happens after an efficiency gain: whether it substitutes for a higher-impact activity, reduces absolute demand for energy and materials, or is absorbed into further consumption. That question links individual behaviour to wider pricing, infrastructure and marketing systems. It also helps explain why a destination can improve environmental performance per visitor yet still experience rising aggregate pressure on transport networks, ecosystems, water supplies or waste services as visitor volumes expand.

A practical way to assess tourism growth and sustainability together

For destination managers, tourism businesses and readers evaluating sustainability claims, the most useful response is not to assume either that growth is always harmful or that efficiency is always sufficient. Instead, examine scale, intensity and distribution together. The following questions help separate a genuine reduction in pressure from a relative improvement that may be overwhelmed by growth:

1. Measure total impact as well as impact per visitor, guest-night or unit of revenue.
2. Track demand growth over the same period used to report efficiency improvements.
3. Identify which pressures are locally limiting, such as water, housing, biodiversity or transport capacity.
4. Separate benefits to residents, workers and local firms from aggregate tourism revenue alone.
5. Test whether lower-impact options actually replace high-impact activity or simply add more travel and consumption.
6. State the assumptions behind growth forecasts and show how they affect environmental targets.

This framework does not prescribe a single target for every destination. It makes the underlying trade-offs visible. A place with underused infrastructure and strong environmental safeguards may be able to increase tourism with limited additional pressure, while a destination already beyond ecological or social thresholds may need demand management rather than further expansion. The central point is that sustainability requires attention to absolute outcomes, not only improved ratios.

Efficiency can reduce the footprint of each trip, but continued growth can still increase the footprint of tourism overall.

What later evidence adds to the 2010 argument

The studies below use different methods, so they should not be treated as one combined experiment. Together they show how the debate developed from a conceptual critique of consumer culture toward measurable questions about tourism volume, emissions and limits.

Where the argument has limits

The 2010 article should not be read as an empirical demonstration that consumerism causes every failure of sustainable tourism. Its method is conceptual: it applies a sociological framework to tourism and advances an interpretation of the economic and cultural conditions surrounding tourism development. It does not provide an experimental counterfactual showing what tourism would look like under a different value system, nor does its abstract establish a quantified effect size for consumer culture.

There are also practical reasons to avoid treating all growth as equivalent. Additional visitor spending can support employment, infrastructure, conservation projects and household income, especially where alternatives are limited. Distribution matters: a locally owned, low-impact tourism activity that increases income without breaching environmental thresholds is not the same as high-carbon growth that concentrates gains while exporting costs. A useful sustainability assessment therefore asks who benefits, who bears the costs and whether total pressures remain within acceptable limits.

Another limitation is that consumer behaviour is only one part of the system. Transport networks, planning rules, taxation, marketing, labour conditions, ownership structures, housing markets and technology all influence tourism impacts. Framing unsustainability as a matter of individual tourists making better choices can obscure these structural conditions. Conversely, discussing structures without consumer demand can miss the scale effects generated by frequent travel, long distances and high levels of expenditure.

What sustainable tourism looks like under this lens

Seen through the consumerism lens, sustainable tourism is not defined by a green label attached to continued expansion. It requires evidence that tourism activity is improving environmental and social outcomes in absolute terms or remaining within agreed limits. That can include better technology and management, but it may also involve longer stays instead of more frequent short trips, stronger public transport, visitor caps in sensitive places, pricing or reservation systems, protection of resident housing, and policies that retain more value locally.

The approach also changes the language of success. Instead of asking only how many more arrivals a destination can attract, policymakers can ask whether tourism contributes to community wellbeing, resilient livelihoods, ecological integrity and fair access to resources. Those goals are compatible with growth in some contexts and may require stabilisation or contraction in others. The key is to make growth a variable to evaluate rather than an automatic objective.

Higgins-Desbiolles’s 2010 paper remains relevant because it highlights a tension that later emissions research can now quantify more clearly. Global tourism has achieved efficiency improvements, yet demand growth has been strong enough for total emissions to rise. That does not validate every element of the paper’s political-economic interpretation, but it does support the practical warning beneath it: sustainability cannot be judged only by how efficiently tourism operates. It also depends on how much tourism occurs, what forms it takes, and which values and incentives shape that demand.

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Sophie Anderson — author

Sophie Anderson works in the Environment & Climate area as both an author and reviewer. Her professional background combines environmental science, geography and applied research, with a focus on climate adaptation, biodiversity and sustainable land use. Her c...