Abstract
The number of tourists has been increasing for a long time and it can be expected that tourist numbers will soon equal the situation before the covid-19 virus pandemic. Tourist arrivals represent not only a significant revenue item for the stakeholders but also a threat to the environment.
A common focus of environmental tourism research is the immediate environmental disruptions at a destination, such as the loss (destruction) of vegetation on hiking trails or littering. In recent years, however, there has been an increasing interest in researching environmental impacts that do not occur directly in the destination space: the catering of tourists.
Tourist consumption is associated with a higher demand for more environmentally intensive foods and a higher amount of food consumed and wasted. Several studies have attempted to quantify the demands of tourism on water resources, land use and emissions, but all of these studies have in common the fact that they do not include food-related demands in their quantification.
The main objective of this paper is to calculate the approximate amount of water, emissions and land area associated with tourist meals. The calculation primarily uses UNWTO data on the number of global nights spent, FAO data on national food availability, which is closest to average citizen diets, and data from Poore and Nemecek (2018), which includes the environmental demands of food production.