Low-carbon tourism for island destinations: A crucial alternative for sustainable development

ABSTRACT

The impact of climate change has been evidenced in several tourist destinations, and triggered concerns on the destination development. Low-carbon tourism has become a national, if not, global agenda that can be used to mitigate the climate change impact caused by the tourist destinations. To respond to this timely agenda and the United Nation World Tourism Organisation's (UNWTO) callout, this study establishes and verifies important components and attributes of low-Carbon destinations, particularly on island destination, which are still unexamined in the literature. Taking on the perspective of tourists, this study is driven by Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) theory which is a consolidative theoretical framework that integrates environmental input (external), emotional status (internal) and behavioural responses to explain actual behaviours of low-carbon tourists. Integrated generalised structured component analysis (IGSCA) and multigroup analysis were performed on 1808 travellers who posed different degrees of psychological fear of the COVID-19 pandemic. During COVID-19, health and safety risks have become a critical concern;therefore, this study further explores the moderating effect of risk from the perspective of the low- and high-perceived risk travellers, before identifying the attitude-behaviour gaps of these two groups. The study provides theoretical insights into low-carbon tourism experience at the island destinations and offers useful managerial implications on low-carbon destination development.