Climate change has become the pandemic condition that now threatens higher forms of life on Earth.

6 min readAug 10, 2023

Climate change has become the pandemic condition that now threatens higher forms of life on Earth. Tourism is fully aware even though in some sectors it can’t get over how well it has performed coming out of the Covid pandemic. In its telling, despite $1,000 hotel rooms, $1,000 RT coach fares to cross the Atlantic, employment shortages in everything from air traffic controllers to housekeepers, and persnickety inflation, summer business is setting new records for travel purveyors.

Summer heat, flash floods and forest fires out of control are also setting new records.

The best thinking about how tourism should proceed is now coming from inside tourism itself.

Science, which says disruption of business as usual is no longer the enemy, has become tourism’s trusted guide. There is a rush to embrace.

Economists and climatologists tell us that we’re at the verge of creative innovation that’s as encompassing as the Enlightenment.

If anything, they, together with business leaders, say the big challenge now is to get all stakeholders to accept that we have progressed beyond the production economy and its worship of Gross Domestic Product into a global Impact Economy in which the only reliable guidance comes from measuring everything we do for its impacts on effecting climate action.

Cleaning house

Competition can remain a driving economic force, but it becomes competition in societal problem-solving in which governments and businesses work collaboratively.

Any rational American knows how hard it is to even consider this way forward. We are tampering with something sacred in our legacy worldview. Yet these are the most respected voices in tourism, funded by tourism, talking to tourism.

In its scholar-driven report from April this year, The Rise of the Impact Economy, The Travel Foundation shows that tourism itself is at fault for the narrow options to supersede business as usual.

“[T]he inertia in the global tourism system has been too large. . . [L]ed by the World Travel Council in 2009, the industry pledged to reduce carbon emissions by a minimum of 25% by 2020, when in fact emissions rose by 40%.” And after 20 years of talk, “the aviation sector has achieved no emission reductions.”

Reporting deepens, but still lags

As important as it is to have tourism talking to itself and having science and respected journalism join in the critique, none has yet forecast how the relentless hammering of climate change has now progressed from impacts on the residents of destinations overwhelmed by mass travel to disrupt life in the places where travelers come from: New York, Chicago — California.

Wildfire burns mansions in Orange County, California (Credit Jeff Gritchen/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images)

It’s only the tip of the spear when UNESCO applies its Danger category to life in Venice, where, according to CNN, “tourists routinely swim in the UNESCO-protected canals, which double as the city’s sewer system, surfed [cq] down the Grand Canal [and] stripped for a skinny dip beside the 14th-century Arsenale landmark.”

How long is it before Conde Nast Traveler that made the UNESCO its featured online August 4 story starts to report on people we know who, of necessity, are staying put, busy restoring their lives?

Where we live the new danger zone

Consider the thousands becoming tens of thousands that have lost their homes and local businesses to nature’s revenge that now face the aggression of an insurance industry that avoids property owners’ desperation by going bankrupt. In Florida alone, 9 property insurers have shut down since 2021.

NOAA reports the total cost of U.S. billion-dollar disasters over the last 5 years (2018–2022) amounts to $595.5 billion, with a 5-year annual cost average of $119.1 billion, the latter nearly triple the 43-year inflation adjusted annual average cost.

“Climate change is no longer a future issue,” says the leading public scientist on climate change Katharine Hayhoe, speaking after release of the latest (March) report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“[I]t is right here where we live, it is right now, and the time to fix it is also here and now.”

Property owners might well wish they were blotto on a cruise ship!

We can also expect that in this epoch of climate change, tourism that relies on transatlantic aviation will also face ethical challenges to bucket-list preening.

At home, we will be told to build back smarter, but this is scant option for much of Africa, where climate change has hastened the spread of deserts from drought-inducing agricultural practices, ignorance, and the inheritance of state corruption from colonial rule that have left the Fertile Crescent mere biblical myth.

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon (Credit The New York Times)

Mass migrations lead to refugee camps where victims become prey to destabilizing ideologies. The dream becomes escape to those European countries that once colonized them.

We’ve already had a foretaste of how that works out in the case of the overloaded refugee boat bound for Italy intercepted by Greek authorities in a botched intervention. Was theirs an attempt at rescue or turning the refugees back? It’s not clear which, but the botch came at the cost of hundreds of lives, mostly of women and children below decks, all of which only investigations may clarify.

Domestic politics among Europe’s Mediterranean countries will drag their feet about solutions while at best interning victims in new refugee camps.

Are new catastrophes inevitable?

How will northern Europeans and Americans still feel about pleasuring ourselves along these shores of infamy? Does this become an international issue about climate impacts on women and children? How does the EU weigh in?

Fishing trawler Adriana overloaded with refugees before capsizing in June with hundreds lost (Credit BBC)

At what point do we experience a Hayhoe moment that renders us woke, or at least awakened while otherwise transfixed by where we live? When we do travel again, might the accumulation of personally experienced disasters and headlines of catastrophe associated with so many bucket-list countries lead to stepped-up promotion by destinations that pitch our own North American homelands?

At the start of August, still in mid-summer, UN Chief António Guterres declared that global warming has become “global boiling.” Citing extreme temperatures, Zoritsa Urosevic, executive director of the World Tourism Organization, at least faintly echoes that “Climate change may lead to a change of perception of tourism.”

TravelAge West newly reports that “High prices are a current and future threat to a robust travel industry.” The Travel Foundation now forecasts that short distance trip by car, rail and ferry will be 81% of all trips by 2050, increasing from 69% in 2019.

My bet is that it won’t take nearly that long. Where will you put your own money down?

NOTES

https://www.afar.com/magazine/why-are-flights-so-expensive-right-now

https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/travelbuzz/2106706-era-1-000-night-hotel.html

https://www.webintravel.com/travel-spending-to-soar-by-28-in-the-next-12-months-reveals-outpayce-research/?utm_source=eNewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nstraveltoday&oly_enc_id=1827H2661590B8V

https://www.zurich.com/en/media/magazine/2022/there-could-be-1-2-billion-climate-refugees-by-2050-here-s-what-you-need-to-know#:~:text=This%20climate%20migration%20is%20expected,climate%20change%20and%20natural%20disasters.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/08/04/how-florida-let-top-insurer-abandon-homeowners-their-time-greatest-need/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/2022-us-billion-dollar-weather-and-climate-disasters-historical-context

https://www.ubs.com/global/en/sustainability-impact/sustainability-insights/videos.html#latest

https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/italy-tourists-bad-behavior/index.html

https://www.cntraveler.com/story/venice-unesco-world-heritage-in-danger-list

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/2022-us-billion-dollar-weather-and-climate-disasters-historical-context