Home Our Experts Dr Ya-Yen Sun

Dr Sun is a Senior Lecturer at the Business School, University of Queensland, Australia. Her research addresses tourism sustainability by establishing carbon emissions assessment tools and frameworks to inform decision making in tourism. Her work leverages the environmentally extended input-output modelling to trace comprehensive emissions from our travel, to identify drivers and enablers for mitigation, and to calculate the trade-off of the emission cost per dollar GDP. She successfully constructed and analysed tourism’s climate impacts for individual countries (Taiwan, China, Japan, Australia, Norway, and New Zealand) and provided the first detailed estimate of the global travel impact on greenhouse gas emissions.

Dr Sun worked with global tourism end users to address the challenge of carbon management. She worked with Statistics New Zealand, Statistics Norway and VisitScotland to set up the national tourism carbon emissions inventory; She advised tourism businesses in the UK and Australia to carbon label their products; She also assisted no-profit organizations to disseminate tourism emissions data to their members and destinations. Dr Sun is currently leading the Australia Research Council Discovery Project to set up the global tourism carbon emissions database and identify enablers for tourism decarbonization.