Air pollution and tourism growth relationship: exploring regional dynamics in five European countries through an EKC model.

The present study intends to explore the relationship between tourism growth and air pollution at a regional level for five important tourism European destinations: France, Spain, Greece, Portugal, and Italy. Most of the studies found in the literature examine this relationship on a national scale and focus only on the CO2 pollutant, which is a greenhouse gas but not a critical pollutant in terms of air quality and human exposure. This research focuses on a regional basis (NUTS 2 classification) and takes into account the main critical pollutants in terms of urban air pollution (namely: NOx, PM10, and PM2.5), and considers 10 years, from 2009 until 2018. This work aims to investigate evidence of a tourism-induced Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) for the countries through the construction of five panels, one for each country, including different variables: the Gross Domestic Product, the energy consumption, and the number of nights spent at tourist accommodation establishments from both domestic and foreign tourists. The Levin-Lin-Chu unit root test proves the variables to be stationary, while the Pedroni cointegration test shows that they are integrated. The pooled OLS estimator is employed throughout the countries to check the relationship among the variables. Results reveal that the tourism-induced EKC hypothesis is not validated for any of the countries. The findings also show that in Portugal, Italy, and Greece, there is a negative relationship between economic growth and environmental pollution, while mixed evidence is found for France and Spain. Moreover, differences in the impacts of international and domestic tourists on air pollution are found: foreign tourists negatively impact emissions, while domestic ones increase them. This result is clear for Spain, Greece, and Italy. The Granger panel causality test is then conducted to see the causality among the variables.

Multi-sectoral impact assessment of an extreme African dust episode in the Eastern Mediterranean in March 2018.

In late March 2018, a large part of the Eastern Mediterranean experienced an extraordinary episode of African dust, one of the most intense in recent years, here referred to as the "Minoan Red" event. The episode mainly affected the Greek island of Crete, where the highest aerosol concentrations over the past 15 yeas were recorded, although impacts were also felt well beyond this core area. Our study fills a gap in dust research by assessing the multi-sectoral impacts of sand and dust storms and their socioeconomic implications. Specifically, we provide a multi-sectoral impact assessment of Crete during the occurrence of this exceptional African dust event. During the day of the occurrence of the maximum dust concentration in Crete, i.e. March 22nd, 2018, we identified impacts on meteorological conditions, agriculture, transport, energy, society (including closing of schools and cancellation of social events), and emergency response systems. As a result, the event led to a 3-fold increase in daily emergency responses compare to previous days associated with urban emergencies and wildfires, a 3.5-fold increase in hospital visits and admissions for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) exacerbations and dyspnoea, a reduction of visibility causing aircraft traffic disruptions (eleven cancellations and seven delays), and a reduction of solar energy production. We estimate the cost of direct and indirect effects of the dust episode, considering the most affected socio-economic sectors (e.g. civil protection, aviation, health and solar energy production), to be between 3.4 and 3.8 million EUR for Crete. Since such desert dust transport episodes are natural, meteorology-driven and thus to a large extent unavoidable, we argue that the efficiency of actions to mitigate dust impacts depends on the accuracy of operational dust forecasting and the implementation of relevant early warning systems for social awareness.