Abstract

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 economic implications of increasing oil prices for tourism and discusses key dimensions relevant for tourism in a post peak oil world. It will be useful for tourism stakeholders globally, postgraduate students in tourism and resource management, ecological economists and those researching issues of resource efficiency, carrying capacity and global environmental change.

Susanne Becken is the Director of the Griffith Institute for Tourism (GIFT) and a Professor at Griffith University, Australia. She is also Adjunct Professor at Lincoln University, New Zealand. Her research interests include sustainable tourism, climate change, energy use and resource efficiency, resilience, and environmental policy. She has published widely in these areas and her most recent papers appear in the Journal of Travel Research, the Journal of Sustainable Tourism, Annals of Tourism Research and Global Environmental Change.

The complexities of both tourism as an industry and oil as a natural resource make the combination of topics in the book highly informational and practical to multiple disciplines. Tourism and Oil would be useful and easily integrated into course curriculums for instruction on tourism planning and development, sustainability initiatives, geography, social psychology, natural resource management, climate change mitigation, and business and economics.

This book illustrates how significant oil is for global tourism and describes in detail the road that leads to peak oil. It examines oil and transport costs and what changes in these can mean for future tourism. The volume is important reading for anyone involved in the tourism and aviation industries.

At last, a measured and realistic appraisal of tourism in the future in relation to the availability or otherwise of oil. Becken has produced an excellent and fair review of the key issues involved in this most topical of subjects, avoiding the sometimes absurd scenarios or inevitable doom and gloom writing that has appeared on this topic. This book is essential reading for anyone and everyone seriously interested in the future of tourism in an age of oil scarcity.