Ecological effects of energy use and tourism-induced transport modes among coastline Mediterranean countries

Purpose: Motivated by the criticality of transportations system in tourism activities, this study further uncovers the effect of the main transportation modes arising from inbound tourism activities on the ecological footprint across the panel of selected coastline Mediterranean countries (CMC). Design/methodology/approach: The study considers a suitable econometric approach for the case of CMC with the dataset that covers the period 1998–2022. Findings: While the result reveals that all the modes of transportation except air deteriorate environmental sustainability by increasing ecological footprint in the long run, higher impact of environmental woe is associated with the land transportation. Similarly, the findings further show that economic expansion and conventional energy utilization in the examined panel and in each country spurs ecological footprint, thus worsening environmental quality. Meanwhile, for the country-specific observations, ecological footprint is (1) mitigated by tourism activities associated with air, water and land transports in Spain, (2) triggered by tourism activities associated with land transport in Croatia and (3) spurred by land transport in Italy. Originality/value: Policy inference from these results suggests the need to scale up the adoption of a low-emission transportation system in the countries.