About the Speaker:
Dr Ya Yen Sun is Associate Professor at the School of Business, The University of Queensland (UQ). Her research addresses tourism sustainability, focusing on economic impacts and environmental footprinting. Her work on tourism economic impacts uses 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. Dr Sun also works on the environmental perspectives of travel behaviour, quantifying the carbon and water footprint of tourism. She successfully constructed and analysed tourism impacts for individual countries and regions (e.g., Taiwan, China, Japan, United States and New Zealand). Additionally, she provided the first detailed estimate of the global travel impact on greenhouse gas emissions.
Dr Sun worked closely with federal and local administers, including Statistics Norway, Indonesia Ministry of Finance, Taiwan Ministry of the Interior Construction Agency, Taiwan Forestry Bureau, and the US National Park Service. Her research projects include cases with national tourism carbon emission inventory, tourism employment vulnerability, tourism marketing programs, and national park management. Dr Sun has published in top academic journals, including Nature Climate Change, Tourism Management, Journal of Travel Research and Journal of Sustainable Tourism. Before joining UQ from Taiwan in 2018, She had 9 consecutive research projects with the Taiwan Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST), which is equivalent to the Australian Research Council (ARC), and received 4 governmental grants. Dr Sun is currently the lead CI of the ARC Discovery Project, which will set up the global tourism carbon emissions database and identify enablers for tourism decarbonization.
About the Seminar:
Governments have pledged to rapidly decarbonize tourism to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. Under this premise, destinations urgently need information to track sectoral carbon emissions and identify areas that require policy interventions. In this seminar, Dr Sun will present a macroeconomic framework capable of tracking and benchmarking tourism mitigation progress against net-zero milestones. She will illustrate this framework using the case study of Australia, showing that Australia’s tourism system is not on track, even though progress has been made on four out of six macro-scale indicators. Additionally, Dr Sun will explain how this framework allows the responsibility of emissions mitigation to be allocated across the central government, destination management organizations, tourism firms, and tourists. This provides a holistic approach that outlines the macro- and micro-mitigation approaches required for all tourism stakeholders.
