Publications
2021. Journal of Cleaner Production 318. “Bracketing sustainability: Carbon footprinting March Madness to rethink sustainable tourism approaches and measurements.” J. A. Cooper and Brian P. McCullough. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2021.128475.
2020. Tourism Geographies 22(3) 525-535. “Cancelling March Madness exposes opportunities for a more sustainable sports tourism economy.” J. A. Cooper and Derek H. Alderman. doi: 10.1080/14616688.2020.1759135
As an extension of my research carbon footprinting Tennessee football tourism, I in conjunction with my advisor and coauthor, Dr. Derek H. Alderman, lifted the methodology I had developed and applied it where we didn't have as precise ticketing data: the 2019 NCAA "March Madness" Men's Basketball Tournament. The methodology attempts to center geography even when highly precise tourist origin data such as geolocated ticketing figures or survey responses is absent. We chose the 2019 March Madness as a comparison case to the 2020 tournament which was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In our commentary, we discuss a broader tourism economy that considers the balance between a sustainable tourism economy, society, and environment by discussing these pillars of sustainability in relation to both years' tournament play or cancellation. We try to highlight the local businesses that are often forgotten in popular and media discourse that prefers to focus upon the collegiate and television economic impacts. We argue for a more resilient local tourism economy that recognizes and prepares for the possibility of environmental or health disasters and is proactive in its attempt to brace for and recover from these instances in an equitable, regenerative manner.
Our co-authored commentary discussing sustainable tourism in the age of COVID-19 is published in Tourism Geographies. My full-length paper discussing the deeper methodology of the carbon footprinting associated with the commentary is published in the Journal of Cleaner Production with Dr. Brian P. McCullough (Texas A&M). We present the model in detail, arguing that it is a novel, data-poor tool that is advantageous in its use as an initial tool for broadly assessing an event or industry's greenhouse gas impact. We detail the methods used to arrive at our finding that the 2010 NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament contributed about 200 million kilograms of greenhouse gas emissions to the global carbon budget. Hopefully, models like this can be used by organizations to begin traveling a path towards a more sustainable future.
The GitHub repository with the datasets and the PostgreSQL, PostGIS, and Python code used to calculate the footprint are at https://github.com/cooperjaXC/covid_marchmadness.
Our co-authored commentary discussing sustainable tourism in the age of COVID-19 is published in Tourism Geographies. My full-length paper discussing the deeper methodology of the carbon footprinting associated with the commentary is published in the Journal of Cleaner Production with Dr. Brian P. McCullough (Texas A&M). We present the model in detail, arguing that it is a novel, data-poor tool that is advantageous in its use as an initial tool for broadly assessing an event or industry's greenhouse gas impact. We detail the methods used to arrive at our finding that the 2010 NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament contributed about 200 million kilograms of greenhouse gas emissions to the global carbon budget. Hopefully, models like this can be used by organizations to begin traveling a path towards a more sustainable future.
The GitHub repository with the datasets and the PostgreSQL, PostGIS, and Python code used to calculate the footprint are at https://github.com/cooperjaXC/covid_marchmadness.