In climate conscious times cheap flights, glitzy hotels, and desert golf look like carbon-wrapped luxuries. Not fair, says Geoffrey Lipman, assistant secretary-general of the UN World Tourism Organization, who says the tourist trade's climate costs are balanced by economic and social gains.
 | Geoffrey Lipman, Assistant Secretary-General, UN World Tourism Organization"It is possible some forms of travel are too cheap. But if you want to be responsible you commit to offset the carbon impact of your travel" (Photo: UNWTO) |
These days we are told we should holiday at home to reduce our carbon footprint. Would less international travel mean a healthier planet?
I think the premise is wrong. Why should tourism be singled out? After all, flying is responsible for just 2 to 5 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions. To say we must stop flying tomorrow is naive. The premise should be: fly responsibly.
And we have to consider the consequences of stopping flying. Eighty percent of the economy of the Maldives depends on tourism. In sub-Saharan Africa, the common export product is tourism, 30 percent of the services economy. Many places have little else, and you can’t get to these places without flying.
So how is the tourism industry acting against climate change?
The aviation industry is experimenting with new airframes, new means of propulsion, and biofuels. It is possible, the industry says, that we could have carbon neutral aircraft by 2050.
The Six Senses hotel chain, for example, uses organic materials and new technologies for showers, for lighting, and construction materials. Scandic hotels have created very energy efficient rooms. The Marriott chain has invested massively in reforestation programs in Brazil.
It’s often said that places are “ruined” by tourism. Where has the industry gone wrong?
The old pattern was that a destination saw tourism as a way to improve the economy and so encouraged a free flow of tourists. Tourist suppliers saw opportunities to make money. Over time you got distortions.
The Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean nearly ruined their own product. They weren’t measuring the impact of building golf courses and hotels and ended up with water shortages.
So they changed the model from mass tourism, moved up market, offered fewer cheap flights, and started to measure the impacts of tourism. But we need different models for different destinations, and mass tourism will still work in some places.
What are governments doing to ease the pressure?
The Egyptian government, for example, is looking at the biodiversity and carbon impacts of mass tourism in the Sharm El Sheikh resort area. If they don’t want too many dive tourists killing the coral reefs they could introduce capacity limits or higher prices.
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It’s the same with the gorillas in Rwanda; you pay a licence fee because of the impact of humans on the gorilla habitat.
Another mechanism could be a fund into which tourists contribute to pay for conservation. In Sri Lanka, the government has started identifying forests to sequester carbon and is measuring sequestration against the climate impact of tourists.
Where has tourism actively helped to preserve the environment?
The great conservation efforts along the Great Barrier Reef in Australia have been made mainly through tourist income.
In game parks in Africa a combination of local entrepreneurship and community involvement has helped preserve some of the forests. In the CAMPFIRE project in Zimbabwe, for example, people in local villages are paid to preserve animals for tourists rather than destroying them.
Has anywhere been “ruined” by restricting tourism. Has Bhutan, for example, suffered by limiting visitor numbers?
Bhutan measures its quality of life differently, by Gross National Happiness not GDP. They concluded early on they would rather keep control than succumb to a total free-market approach. Has Bhutan suffered? Who can say? But it has not had the same pace of development as elsewhere.
The German Development Agency did a study calculating the benefits of flights coming into Bali. It said if you remove the flight many people would lose their jobs in tourism and go back to their villages. The result would be increased deforestation.
How do we balance the local benefits of tourism against the wider climate costs? Isn’t some travel too cheap to be sustainable?
It is possible some forms of travel are too cheap to be sustainable. But if you want to be really responsible you commit to offset the carbon impact of your travel.
Previous debates about tourism were all about striking a balance between economics, social issues, and the environment, about finding a “triple bottom line”. Get the balance right and you can be in the black in all three areas.
Since the IPCC report, climate has created a new set of parameters. So a new “quadruple bottom line” is the goal, with climate the starting point. You can fiddle with the other three issues, but you can’t fiddle with the climate.
editor: James Tulloch
publishing date: August 3, 2009
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