A collaborative effort: a research team spanning four universities

This study is the work of four lead authors and one PhD data scientist, from four universities.

Associate Professor Ya-Yen Sun

School of Business, University of Queensland, Australia.

Dr Sun’s research addresses tourism sustainability, focusing on economic impacts and environmental footprinting. Her work on tourism economic impacts is to use the input-output modelling to provide quantitative estimates on jobs, income and GDP with respect to changes in national tourism policy, market development or special events and disasters. In addition, she also works on the environmental perspectives of travel behaviour, quantifying the tourism carbon footprint and tourism water footprint. She successfully constructed and analysed tourism impacts for individual countries (Taiwan, China, Japan, United States, and New Zealand) and provided the first detailed estimate of the global travel impact on greenhouse gas emissions.

You can read more about Dr Sun’s work, including publications, here. [Link https://business.uq.edu.au/profile/1346/ya-yen-sun]

Professor Stefan Gössling

Professor of Tourism Research at Linnaeus University and Human Ecology at Lund University.

Stefan Gössling is a professor of Tourism Research at Linnaeus University and Human Ecology at Lund University. His research focuses on the sustainability of tourism, transport & mobilities.

He says “I have studied interrelationships of tourism, transport and sustainability for a quarter of a century.  My ambition is to contribute to basic and applied science, with the overall objective to develop solutions for a growing number of environmental problems.”

You can read more about Professor Gössling’s work  and publications here. [https://www.stefangossling.de/]

Distinguished Professor James Higham

Professor of Sustainable Tourism, Department of Tourism, Sport and Hotel Management, Griffith University, Australia.

Professor James Higham’s research addresses the broad theme of ‘Tourism and global environmental change’. His research in this  field explores aspects of sustainable tourism in relation to anthropogenic climate change, ecosystems and biodiversity. His research on tourism and climate change focuses on tourism decarbonisation with a particular focus on international transportation, and the challenges of transitioning  to low-carbon tourism. Professor Higham’s research and publications can be viewed at: jameshigham.com  

Professor Manfred Lenzen

Professor of Sustainability Research at the University of Sydney, and leader of the Integrated Sustainability Analysis research group.

Physicist by training, Prof Lenzen has a background in energy systems and especially renewable energy sources. After emigrating from Germany to Australia in 1995, he took up a postdoctoral position at the University of Sydney in order to work on the vacuum glazing project. In 2001, he and his colleague Christopher Dey founded ISA, a centre for developing leading-edge research and applications for environmental and broader sustainability issues, bringing together expertise in environmental science, economics, technology, and social science. Since then, ISA has been prominent in the media.

Dr Futu Faturay

Dr. Futu Faturay has been a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at UQ Business School, the University of Queensland, Australia, since 2023. 

Futu completed his PhD in Sustainability Science from the University of Sydney in 2019 and a Master of Arts in Economics from Georgia State University, USA, in 2012. Futu has authored multiple academic publications in high-impact journals.

His research has been featured in Nature Climate Change, Nature Sustainability, Public Library of Science (PLoS) ONE, Natural Hazards, Applied Energy, Economic Systems Research, Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Management, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, and Sustainable Production and Consumption, among others. Futu is an expert in input-output analysis, climate change impact assessment, and tourism carbon emissions inventories.