Early in January of this year I wrote the essay below that appeared at The “Good Tourism” Blog, under the title A climate-conscious reading of ‘The New York Times’ list of ’52 Places To Go in 2024’, reprinted here with permission and with slight edits and most images added. The essay predicted that by the end of 2024 that anyone planning for leisure travel will be conditioned by how our choices qualify as climate action. In my posting for July 11, I will show how five months later this is playing out. If you feel persuaded to forward this pair of postings to others who might subscribe to or follow The Climate Traveler — either is free — please do so. I need many more subscribers and followers to find a publisher for my travel memoir. I know that this is the year.
People love to travel but keep getting shoved around. We live in an epoch of catastrophic global warming, which frequently forces us to change our travel plans. We haven’t yet reached mid-winter in the northern hemisphere, but freakish cold storms are already diverting us from intended destinations. In January, Storm Isha rerouted thousands of air passengers, many to entirely different countries, like undocumented aliens at the Mexican-US border flown by the governors of Florida and Texas to northern sanctuary cities to score political points.
You’re on a passport-free domestic flight maybe a half-hour from Edinburgh to Bristol when Isha diverts your Airbus to Paris, where you can’t leave the airport without a passport. You have to sleep overnight on the terminal floor, and maybe wind up on a cross-Channel train to get home two days later.
Storm Jocelyn was following.
“[A]bsolutely gobsmackingly bananas”
Leading climatologists find that global warming is getting worse faster. One calls the acceleration “absolutely gobsmackingly bananas”. Others say the evidence isn‘t in yet.
- There were more tornadoes in 2023 than the average between 1991 and 2022.
- Last year, the hottest ever recorded, “Took Chaos to a New Level”, blustered a headline in The New York Times.
- Travel advisors are sending summer sun seekers to cool Scandinavian destinations instead of the Mediterranean.
We know these things. We also know that tourism, which by definition depends on transportation — and favours marketing to long-distance air fliers — worsens greenhouse gas emissions; by as much as 11 percent per year, Bloomberg reports.
Yet anyone whose travel was ruined when Southwest Airlines, by itself, cancelled 16,900 flights during the 2022 holiday season, and who was again flying during the 2023 holiday season, would surely have found the first peak year of airport hassles since 2019 only grudgingly acceptable.
Travellers don’t always mean what they say about climate action
While more than half of people surveyed told Time that their vacations’ environmental impact was at least somewhat important to them, three components of that survey ranked among the next four below cost and dining. The World Travel & Tourism Council, a marketing NGO, ranks traveller concerns higher.
Meanwhile, more of those who advise travellers, such as the high-end Virtuoso consortium of travel advisors and the aptly named Intrepid consortium with its global reach, make at least partially valid claims to sustainable tourism.
Personal forecast: Our new year, 2024, will witness the calving of mass tourism, like glaciers melting away from surrounding overheated seas.
That, or a still further collapse of our already imperiled weather systems.
I believe we can count on human intelligence trumping ideology. Because, look around: The worsening effects of climate change are a problem everywhere.
By the end of 2024, I predict that anyone planning for leisure travel will be conditioned by how our choices qualify as climate action.
A matter of ethics? More likely a matter of experiencing the budget-busting anxiety of climate impacts, or of knowing someone who has.
Our trips can help us rebalance Earth’s prospects
The New York Times influential list of “52 Places to Go for 2024” arguably points travellers to choices that advance climate action.
Many if not most of the list’s destinations are near population centres, so that visitors don’t have to fly in. Consider residents of Almaty, Baltimore, Santiago, Chile, Singapore, Vienna, or wherever people live in high concentrations who can travel among wonders of the world nearby.
While the list barely mentions climate change, its 52 choices about where to go tick most of the right boxes; certainly not all, because NYT readers tend to be affluent and can afford to fly wherever they wish.
Yet in large part the choices are about nature and heritage with little that’s newly built to attract tourists that isn’t already meant for locals. In Manchester, England, as in Kansas City, USA, visitor spending tends to stay in these local economies.
New destination transportation options also support climate action. The subway in Quito is the sixth among South American capitals. Also new across the 52 places are surface rail, electric ferries, cable cars, and multiuse trails.
Lodgings of notice are locally scaled. No chains.
Yet destinations at their official travel websites rarely talk about climate action. Even Oregon, greenest among all US states, says nothing about it at its website.
Missed predictions
The Travel Foundation, a non-governmental organization, along with other British travel & tourism stakeholders, considered this in 2009 when they looked ahead to “Tourism 2023 — towards a sustainable travel and tourism industry”.
With research backed by KPMG, the Foundation and its partners concluded:
“[B]y 2023, public awareness of the impacts of all forms of travel will be much higher than today. Over the next 15 years, the impacts of climate change will increasingly be felt and reported on in diverse forms of new media. Leaders in business and politics are expected to accelerate their action due to the urgency of the task ahead.”
Maybe their prediction about “new media” was on target, but the report’s hopeful forecast never gained acceptance for industry action.
That’s explained in a follow-up in 2023:
“[T]here was never enough noise for the tourism industry to listen and act. For the last decade, the tourism industry has, for the most part, continued business as usual, with a primary focus on growth above all else.”
The follow-up is blunt about what tourism and its policymakers must do by the end of this decade if, “like every other human activity, it’s to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.”
New challenge
The Travel Foundation lays out a challenge for change that now urges:
- More governments including international aviation emissions in their Paris Agreement greenhouse gas reduction plans;
- Tourist boards targeting short-haul customers;
- Travel companies offering net zero products;
- Governments investing in greener forms of transport and the travel industry adopting and promoting them;
- Everyone relying less on offsetting as a ‘sticking plaster’ solution, focusing instead on decarbonisation;
- Everyone considering equity and fairness and recognising that some destinations are more ready for the scenario than others; and
- Slowing the expected rapid growth in aviation by limiting long-haul flights.
The Travel Foundation says it’s time to act:
“[O]ur report is not a prediction, it’s a last chance.”
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