Introduction

It is often said that farmers are on the front lines dealing with global warming, their livelihoods being extraordinarily dependent on the weather. But tour operators and resort owners are not far behind. Imagine a ski resort whose chairlifts are in the lower reaches of mountains, without decent snow. Or a scuba club whose reefs succumbed to warmer and stormier seas. Or a golfing hotel in a district where water shortages made it impossible to keep fairways green.

Paradoxically, the tourism sector is a major source of warming gasses. It accounts for about 5 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. Stop relying on cars and buses, air-conditioning and especially air travel would help to reduce the heating. However, in countries along the equator tourism is the vehicle for poverty alleviation. It is the only way of getting foreign currency and the major source of income. So governments should mitigate and adapt to climate change.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/10/30/business/tourism.php?page=2

Essay by Wouter Wensink
Master in Tourism Destination Management student 2008/2009

Tourism development has long been concentrated in environments that offer specific climatic conditions. The Mediterranean region has been attracting Northern Europeans looking for the traditional, sun, sea and sand-based summer holiday for well over a century. Similarly, the long-standing popularity of skiing holidays in resorts in the European Alps and the US Rockies has been based to a large extent on the predictability and abundance of their annual natural snowfall. However, potential impacts of global warming and climate change on many forms of tourism should be taken seriously in consideration when making new tourism planning & policies. Governments should simply adapt and mitigate to the climate changes.

What I find striking is that the tourism industry suffers or will suffer from its own pollution. I mean it has been estimated that tourism activity may be responsible for 5.3 percent of global CO2 emissions (Goessling, 2002). By far the largest tourism-related contributor to global warming is the transportation sector, accounting for 94 percent of CO2 emissions according to Goessling. You could say that the relationship between climate change and tourism is bidirectional, in that tourism activity is both impacted by, as well as being a major contributor to, this phenomenon.
Adapting and mitigating to climate change sounds promising, however, one should not assume that every country or destination is able to pay for that. For example, concerning the ski lifts, the Whistler Blackcomb Ski Resort in Canada has run a mix of computer simulations to try to determine where the snow will be depending on varying calculations of how much the temperature might rise over 30 years. In addition, the resort has a broader green plan. It is making energy to run the lifts from snow runoff on the mountain. Its ski village is car free. And the resort has diversified from snow and it now has a booming summer business as well. Nevertheless, undertaking new engineering projects and computer simulations take money and expertise that are in short supply in much of the world. In Kenya, for instance, hotels were built to hold as many people as possible. Things like air-conditioning systems are not very efficient. As Judith Gona, executive director of Ecotourism Kenya, said “Adaptation is expensive and the finances are a big challenge for a place like Kenya.”

Aren’t there any positive aspects of this climate change then? Well, in the short term it does, especially in temperate zones. For example, warming trends have lengthened the golfing season in Antalya, Turkey, by over a month, said Ugur Budak, golf coordinator of Akkanat Holdings there. According to David Viner, a researcher at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit in Norwich, there are “opportunities for the revival of northern European resorts, including Blackpool, in the next 20 years, as climate change and rising transport costs offer new holiday opportunities.” In my opinion quite positive, however it would also be the result of our “heating-behavior” which could lead to a climatical degradation of the Mediterranean.

I really hope that in the future the private or/and public realm will have the money to adapt and mitigate to climate change. It’s a huge project and it contains many aspects; changes in both the temporal and the spatial distribution of tourism patterns, infrastructural alterations, more fuel-efficient technologies, carbon-tax etcetera etc. However what lies beyond is a mentality change. The people of the world should know what their behavior implicates for the world and its nature. Although this sounds idealistic, in my opinion, this is the core of the problem we are facing today.