It’s 6,374 miles from Asheville, North Carolina to Baku, Azerbaijan. Events in both places show that wherever we live, the connection between climate change and how we travel for leisure or business will become measured in a way that our travels worsen.
We are slow to think this way.
Instead of connecting, we feel that torrential flooding and extreme heat where we want to go are annoyances of other peoples’ places that travel advisors tell us we can work around when they help plan our trips. Avoid the Med. Go Nordic.
Consider these chickens-come-home-to-roost measurements:
• Acres burned last year across Canada amplified by global warming — 830 million acres or as large as all of England;
• Tropical Storm Helene’s destruction that became the most costly in North Carolina’s history, killing more than 100;
• The last 15 years ranked as the hottest on record in parts of India with three months of summer temperatures reaching almost 122 F, and deaths of hundreds reported said to be in the thousands that go unreported.
Our climate watch shapes up ominously.
In September, Tropical Storm Helene channeled the peak season for viewing fall colors into travel by tens of thousands of North Carolinians into short-distance evacuation.
Two months later when those evacuees lucky enough to find roofs over their homes were daring to drink tap water again, a larger flight from reality swarmed Baku–-65,000 who mostly arrived by jet, hundreds private — trumpeted by Azerbaijani tourism, but also criticized.
Long-distance aviation is one of two causes for the steady rise of global greenhouse gas emissions that leave us complicit.
Airlines backbone long-distance travel, which its business finds most profitable.
The other is that leisure travel is supposed to be about fun, and business travel is about face-to-face dealing. Don’t get in my face about climate denial!
As Katharine Hayhoe writes in her summary of COP29, “[W]hile these Conferences of the Parties are necessary for global climate negotiations, they fall far short of the urgent and transformative action we need.” [emphasis in original]
As for tourism
The best effort humanity has organized to counter global warming — the COP process — allowed tourism, the world’s favorite leisure activity, to take center stage for the first time. At the Thematic Day on Tourism, backers under the banner of UN Tourism were meant to document why travel across all its regions had progressed from greenwashing to climate responsibility.
The outcome instead showed how little had happened since tourism attempted green policies three years ago in Glasgow. However, we also see business travel making its own trustworthy moves in Southeast Asia.
More than 300 travel companies, nonprofit organizations, and government agencies pledged action within a year on two core principles. They would submit climate action plans and cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 to reach net zero by 2050.
How have they done?
According to The Guardian, “The Glasgow Declaration sparked a tremendous response across travel and tourism,” said Julia Simpson, the president and chief executive of the World Travel and Tourism Council, an NGO of travel businesses and a signatory of the declaration. “What the world needs now is measurable action — and there’s no time to lose.”
UN Tourism told us going into the Baku COP that:
• 74% of signatories with climate plans are measuring
• 92% of plans include decarbonization actions
• 73% of plans include actions related to biodiversity protection
• 41% of plans include climate adaptation actions
• 29% of plans refer to climate justice
• 82% of signatories with plans report working in partnership with others
• 44% of plans refer finance actions with this pathway remaining a challenge
But consider various reports following Glasgow up to Baku already published and soon to be:
• The New York Times headlined its report on tourism’s special day in Baku, “Travel Pledged to Help Cut Carbon Emissions. How Has It Done? The tourism industry will be officially recognized at COP29 on Wednesday. Industry leaders signed a climate accord in 2021 to make travel more sustainable, but the results so far are meager.”
• A forthcoming article about Glasgow finds that “only 65 out of 530,000 worldwide travel agencies have signed on. Similarly, only 117 accommodations providers are signatories out of the 29 million providers listed through Booking.com.”
• Most of the biggest emitters haven’t signed on.
• According to a study just published by the Global Carbon Budget project and the University of Exeter, international aviation emissions are projected to increase by 14 percent this year, compared to 2023. These emissions are the industry’s largest contributing factor to climate change, yet major aviation companies have not signed onto the Glasgow Declaration.
• Similarly, most cruise lines — another major industry in the travel world — have steered clear of the declaration.
• While many experts agree that the Glasgow Declaration was an important and necessary first step, few tourism organizations have signed on, those that did haven’t always followed through with their promises, and global emissions are still on the rise. Most signatories haven’t published a climate action plan.
The majority of organizations that did sign on have not yet published climate action plans, which are the essential roadmaps for reaching emission goals, according to the forthcoming article in the Journal of Sustainable Tourism.
The authors found that as of September 2024, only 28 percent of signatories had submitted a plan within the required 12 months. In other words, nearly three-fourths of the entities haven’t delivered what they promised.
“Even these sectoral leaders need to improve their disclosure practices to be considered credible by the international community,” the authors wrote.
There’s no enforcement.
The Glasgow Declaration “lacks legal footing in most countries,” according to Dallen J. Timothy, professor of community resources and development at Arizona State University. He asserts in the NYT piece that Glasgow stands as “more an environmental justice action, rather than a legal measure.”
Jeremy Sampson, chief executive of the nonprofit Travel Foundation and one of the drafters of the Glasgow Declaration, urged patience on the accountability front.
“We’re not at the point of policing people when we still need to be getting everyone on board with climate literacy,” he said.
But Mr. Sampson said he’s proud of the declaration’s impact, saying the Glasgow accord paved the way to COP29.
“Have we made significant progress? I think it’s fair to say that we have,” he said. “Now, here we are with this tourism day in Baku, where tourism is part of the climate conversation and has a role to play.”
