Route-Level Carbon Footprint Assessment for Community-Based Tourism Management: A Case Study from Ban Boonjaem, Thailand

Community-based tourism (CBT) destinations are increasingly expected to align visitor experiences with climate responsibility, yet local managers often lack product-level carbon evidence that can guide practical route redesign and service decisions. This study addresses this aggregation-to-action gap by developing a route-level carbon footprint baseline for a CBT itinerary in Ban Boonjaem, Phrae Province, Thailand. Using an exploratory and applied case study design, the study treats one completed six-hour, non-overnight itinerary as the functional unit and applies a life-cycle-informed operational boundary covering transportation, food and beverage consumption, and solid waste generated during the route test. Primary activity data were collected from one organized route test involving 20 Thai domestic volunteer tourists and were matched with relevant emission factors to estimate total and per-tourist emissions. The tested itinerary generated 0.2234 tCO2e, equivalent to 223.4 kgCO2e in total and approximately 11.2 kgCO2e per tourist per trip. Transportation was the largest emission domain, accounting for 55.89% of total route emissions, followed by food and beverage consumption at 38.55%, while waste contributed 5.56%. Together, transportation and food and beverage represented 94.44% of measured emissions, indicating that the route’s carbon profile was shaped mainly by mobility arrangements and service provisioning rather than waste generation alone. The study contributes a transparent, route-specific operational baseline for low-carbon CBT management. The findings should be interpreted as case-specific decision-support evidence rather than as a destination-wide carbon inventory or statistically generalizable estimate.