sustainability-logo

Journal Browser

Journal Browser

Leisure Travel, Well-being, and Climate Change

A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Psychology of Sustainability and Sustainable Development".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 April 2022) | Viewed by 2590

Special Issue Editors

1. Department of Sociology, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poznań, Poland
2. Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Iceland, Reykjavík, Iceland
Interests: mobility; long-distance travel; urban planning; well-being; climate change mitigation
Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Iceland, Reykjavík, Iceland
Interests: long-distance travel; urban planning; pro-environmental attitudes; pro-environmental behaviors

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

We invite you to participate in a Special Issue on leisure travel, well-being, and climate change.

Mitigating climate change to keep warming below 1.5 or 2 degrees requires behavioral changes (i.e., demand-side solutions, Creutzig et al. 2018), along with changes in technologies and infrastructures. This is particularly true for long-distance travel and tourism, which is responsible for ca. 8% of the global carbon footprint (Lenzen et al. 2018) and a larger share of carbon footprints of wealthy urbanites (Czepkiewicz et al. 2019). A large share of emissions from leisure travel result from aviation, where gains in efficiency have been incremental and smaller than growth in demand (Peeters et al. 2016). There is thus an apparent need for changes in leisure travel and tourism practices, such as avoiding unnecessary trips, shortening travel distances, changing practices at the destination, or shifting to low-carbon travel modes.

Reductions in leisure travel might influence human well-being both positively and negatively. However, research on the topic is relatively scarce (Creutzig et al. 2021), and few studies tackle the issue directly (e.g., Nawijn & Peeters 2010, Ram et al. 2013, de Bloom et al. 2017). New practices of traveling and vacationing, such as slow travel or staycations, have emerged and might play an important role in transitioning towards sustainability (Dickinson et al. 2011, de Bloom et al. 2017), but their impact on human well-being remains understudied. Considerations of how well-being is defined and what constitutes a good or decent life are central to envisioning and enacting low-carbon futures (Lamb & Steinberger 2017, Fuchs et al. 2021). What role does leisure travel have in such futures? What place can leisure travel take in good lives that do not undermine the good lives of others?

Studies on well-being in the context of tourism are commonly focused on promoting new kinds of tourism practices and experiences and rarely connect to demand reductions (e.g., Vada et al. 2019). Some tourism scholars call for a more “positive” and “hopeful” outlook in tourism studies (Filep & Laing 2019). Can these calls be reconciled with climate change mitigation? 

This Special Issue aims to stimulate research in this field and bring together researchers and insights from diverse fields. We invite empirical and theoretical contributions on the following and related topics:

  1. Alternative practices: What are the well-being effects of participation in alternative and low-carbon tourism and vacationing practices, such as slow travel, staycation, micro-trips, etc.?
  2. Well-being concepts: What is the role of different concepts of well-being, such as preference satisfaction, hedonia, life satisfaction, authentic happiness, eudaimonia, human needs, or buen vivir, in studying leisure travel?
  3. Well-being and behavioural change: what is the role of different concepts of well-being, “good life”, “life worth living”, or “decent life” in motivating or hindering behavioral change towards reduced travel?
  4. Covid-19 and leisure travel: What is the impact of travel restrictions on human health and well-being? How can the pandemic and post-Covid recovery influence both well-being and leisure travel demand?
  5. Connecting climate and well-being impacts: What are the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and well-being benefits of various leisure travel practices and travel frequencies? 
  6. Leisure travel and sufficiency: Which leisure travel practices are part of decent living standards, and which would fit into sustainable consumption corridors? How much travel is enough? Is tourism a necessity, or is it a luxury? 
  7. Leisure travel, inequality, and justice: What are the justice, equity, and well-being implications of the unequal participation in long-distance leisure travel? What are the justice, equity, and well-being implications of the potential reductions in leisure travel demand?

Dr. Michał Czepkiewicz
Ms. Áróra Árnadóttir
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • leisure travel
  • tourism
  • long-distance travel
  • mobility
  • well-being
  • good life
  • decent living standards
  • climate change mitigation
  • sufficiency
  • consumption corridors
  • sustainable tourism

Published Papers (1 paper)

Order results
Result details
Select all
Export citation of selected articles as:

Research

18 pages, 648 KiB  
Article
Stadium Travel and Subjective Well-Being of Football Spectators
by Tim F. Thormann, Pamela Wicker and Michael Braksiek
Sustainability 2022, 14(12), 7278; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/su14127278 - 14 Jun 2022
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 1867
Abstract
In the context of leisure travel in sport, the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals to promote public health and combat climate change may be addressed simultaneously. This study investigates football spectators’ carbon footprint that is generated from traveling to the stadium. It also [...] Read more.
In the context of leisure travel in sport, the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals to promote public health and combat climate change may be addressed simultaneously. This study investigates football spectators’ carbon footprint that is generated from traveling to the stadium. It also examines the effects of stadium travel and everyday pro-environmental behavior on spectators’ subjective well-being. The study uses data that were gathered from an online survey in Germany in 2021 (n = 1605). For a detailed carbon footprint assessment, spectators were allowed to indicate multiple transportation means if they switched them during their stadium journey. Seemingly unrelated regression models were calculated to examine the effect of transportation behavior (i.e., stadium travel) and everyday recycling, consumption, and energy-saving behavior on life satisfaction and happiness. Traveling to a home game caused an average carbon footprint of 7.79 kg CO2-e per spectator, or 190.4 tons CO2-e for all home game spectators. Regression results showed that sustainable consumption increased both well-being measures while recycling behavior only positively contributed to happiness. Stadium travel and energy-saving behavior showed no significant effect. These findings implicate that achieving both sustainable development goals can go hand in hand in some contexts of pro-environmental behavior, but not in all dimensions. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Leisure Travel, Well-being, and Climate Change)
Show Figures

Figure 1

Back to TopTop