A s pressure mounted for climate action at the 27th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP27), those outside the mainstream who innovate in responsible travel saw they would go without any hearing at all.
Tourism is said to account for $5.81 trillion of global GDP, or 6.1 percent.
Yet in a runup to COP27 a declaration headlined “Tourism Transformed” by the industry-led UN World Tourism Organization pushed for regaining pre-Covid growth “against the backdrop of COP27, as a solution to the climate emergency.”
COP-27 at Sharm el-Sheikh may have attempted an extra mile, but for the travel industry, especially the powerful UNWTO chain-hotel affiliated Global Hospitality Alliance, greenwashing is endemic. Reaching drawdown – the point at which greenhouse gas emissions start dropping instead of rising -- still calls for a lot more steps in a lot more of other people’s shoes.
In the first week of the meeting, a special report of the Global Climate Budget declared that the past year has been the worst ever for greenhouse gas emissions. While fossil fuel lobbyists controlled command posts and Egyptian hosts crowed about hosting the event, at his preview of the Climate Change Conference, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres observed “The world is ‘on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator.”
The industrial revolution transformed handcrafts into factory work in the way we have known for 200 years. Although the need for time away from assembly lines soon became apparent, one of vacationing’s favorite forms, leisure travel, itself became industrial-scaled mass tourism by the mid-20th century.
Worldwide, the loosely defined category of tourism that includes transportation for leisure, hotel construction, and demands on public works where people visit, adds some eight percent to global carbon emissions. Researchers have forecast that pent-up post-Covid-19 demand for travel will make 2023 a record year for international arrivals that will reach 1.6 billion.
Shunning the impacts
Destinations already shun the impacts.
Venice and Key West, for example, both imposed limits on oversized cruise ships at downtown docks (although Florida’s Governor overturned Key West’s city commission-backed referendum).
Barcelona in 2015 acted to “stop the city from becoming like Venice” by caps on groups visiting iconic sites and limiting daily visitors overall. Unlike other destinations, which typically impose tourism caps to protect natural and heritage environments, the main motivation was to improve the quality of life for residents, who for years had complained that tourists had made their city unlivable.
Regardless, will escapist binging in faraway places that mainstream tourism extols leave us more uncomfortable with ourselves than we already are?
Transportation emissions are a big part of our travel impact. Human-built structures even more so, accounting for 47 percent of our carbon footprint. Although hotels are a small part of the human-built world, unless we’re yurt camping or lodging in something that’s equally recyclable, odds are we’re staying in a hotel.
Meetings magazine reports that 2,658 hotels will open in 2023. Some may be needed for upgrades in energy savings while the sector rapidly replaces workers at all hotels by digital interfacing. New hotels have far less to do with job creation than with keeping ubiquitous chain systems front of mind.
Is this sustainable?
The civilizational threat
Travel has rebounded from Covid because all-hands-on-deck investments made vaccines available. Meanwhile, climate change has become an even greater civilizational threat. But instead of human ingenuity coming to rescue us, COP27 seems to have wound up offering more workarounds than transglobal solidarity.
We among the privileged don’t want to give up rights claimed by historic wrongs.
In the year leading from COP26 in Glasgow to Sharm el-Sheikh, overall emissions rose by almost one percent.
So, apart from roughing it, what can we do to keep right with the planet? And — just asking — can leisure travel possibly weigh in positively on the side of climate action?
The answer to that second question is arguably yes. The answer lies in how we address the first question.
There’s at least awareness inside the UN of a path toward action, though that has nothing to do with UNWTO greenwashing. It’s important to understand that the WTO has always been a marketing organization that evolved from the International Union of Official Tourist Propaganda Organizations established in 1934 and ever since dominated by for-profit travel companies.
Instead, we can look to the UN Act Now campaign that calls for individual actions, “low-carbon travel . . . to fly less, choose destinations that are close to home and pay to offset carbon emissions.”
This redirects travel to places — sometimes unhelpfully labeled as destinations — that themselves intentionally adopt carbon-lowering actions and that hold themselves out to visitors for doing so — essentially what I call The Deep Nearby.
All things being equal, why wouldn’t we want to favor places that are doing the most important work on Earth?
This doesn’t give a free pass to ecotourism unless close to home. For example, Atlantans who fly to New England for fall colors will produce more emissions than they typically would exploring the Okefenokee Swamp or near but deeply remote Cumberland Island
Instead of choosing our places to stay by maximizing our hotel brand loyalty benefits, we can look for locally owned places to stay that immerse us in communities where locals directly make us feel at home and help address social inequities. As “local” becomes emphatic closer to home everywhere, new green reward programs can become part of a global alternative system.
Add farm-to-fork culinary trails that emphasize plant-based menus, and places to sightsee that can’t accommodate busloads at a time but instead remain cherished with limits on the numbers of visitors at a time. Walk, bicycle, share rides where you want to go.
Gen Z and the Epoch of Repair
This is all left-brain stuff to Gen Z and their larger wideawake cohort. When UN Secretary-General Guterras previewed COP27 with his doomsday remarks, Greta Thunberg & Co. didn’t hear blather meant for shelving. This was the most Woke call to action ever heard. Having to clean up generations of mess, they know they’re all in this epoch of repair together.
Sharing among themselves is natural.
Let your own travel choices strengthen their commitment. Exult in what you’re learning.
The Deep Nearby predicates that there’s something we all seek, especially as pandemics may become prevalent. Which is to say, the universality of our existence on Earth.
My guess is that in North America it will be nonprofit and for-profit companies (not including the travel industry as we’ve known it) that wind up pushing popular movements for government action (something I drafted before John Kerry proposed his version at Sharm el-Sheikh).
In my next posting, I will detail how this happens through leisure travel in an honest transformational role.
NOTES
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1099933/travel-and-tourism-share-of-gdp/
https://www.unwto.org/news/tourism-transformed-at-unwto-ministers-summit
https://www.unwto.org/events/unwto-event-at-the-cop27-un-climate-change-conference
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/20/climate/un-climate-cop27-loss-damage.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/11/11/cop27-egypt-carbon-budget-gas-projects/ . . . https://www.iea.org/news/global-co2-emissions-rebounded-to-their-highest-level-in-history-in-2021
https://www.unwto.org/events/unwto-event-at-the-cop27-un-climate-change-conference
https://thepublicsradio.org/article/un-climate-talks-reach-halftime-with-key-issues-unresolved
https://www.ft.com/content/2604ecbe-9321-4b0f-814d-106139381e2c
https://www.traveloffpath.com/multiple-destinations-are-shutting-their-doors-to-budget-travelers/
https://architecture2030.org/why-the-building-sector/
https://time.com/6223277/international-energy-agency-carbon-emissions-2022/
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/06/climate/loss-and-damage-climate-cop27.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/07/world/americas/belize-coral-reef-preservation.html
https://www.carbonbrief.org/tourism-responsible-for-8-of-global-greehouse-gas-emissions-study-finds/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7771910/ National library of Medicine, section 3.2.1. “Sustainable tourism In the aftermath of COVID-19, the tourism industry is bound to be reorganized based on actual planning and not just paperwork.
