Introduction

Global warming and its impact on the tourism and travel has become quite a topic in recent times. While tourism itself is thought to contribute gigantically to this threatening situation, yet many still interest themselves with the impact that such predicted climate change will have on the tourism industry.

Original article: “Tough Challenges and Major Opportunities”, 28 September 2007 (Davos Conference on Climate Change and Tourism) – http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=517&ArticleID=5676&l=en

Essay by David Ekesong
Master in Tourism Destination Management student 2008/2009

While the article focuses on tough challenges and major opportunities for the tourism industry, of particular interest to me is the relationship between the expected exponential growth in international arrivals and climate change. The article puts forward the following arguments:

Carbon dioxide emissions from the sector’s transport, accommodation and other tourism activities are estimated to account for between 4 and 6% of total emissions, If no mitigation measures are taken, tourism contribution to CO2 emissions could grow by 150% in the next 30 years, based on UNWTO tourism market forecasts, Impacts of climate change on the tourism sector will steadily intensify, particularly under higher global GHG emission scenarios, Changing climate patterns might alter major tourism flows where climate is of paramount importance, such as Northern Europe, the Mediterranean and the Caribbean, Coastal, mountain and nature-based destinations in least developed countries and small island developing states might be particularly affected. While I agree with the fact that climate change as a result of global warming might alter tourism flows, however, it might have no real impact on total international arrivals since it might only shift visitation from some destinations to others. According to an international team of economists, by the end of the century the expected rise in temperature will make many current tourist hot spots a bit too toasty while making some currently chilly places warm enough to entice fair-weather travellers.

The United States is predicted to be one of the tourism winners, with international tourism to the U.S. increasing an estimated 13.7 percent over what it would have been if the atmosphere wasn’t warming up, claim researchers Andrea Bigano of the Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei in Milan, Italy, Jacqueline M. Hamilton of Hamburg University and Richard S.J. Tol of the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin.

“Climate change would shift patterns of tourism towards higher altitudes and latitudes,” they write. “Tourism may double in colder countries and fall by 20 percent in warmer countries….For some countries international tourism may treble whereas for others it may be cut in half.”

One other puzzling point about global warming and its impact on the environments is that it has sort of relegated other environmental issues to the backbench. To use the words of Roberto Iglesias, a biologist from Unam university’s marine sciences station near Cancun “local environmental problems, such as sewage, farm run-off and over-fishing, could kill much of the world’s reefs decades before global warming does”. The net effect of pollution is as bad or maybe worse than the effects of global warming,” said Iglesias, a co-author of the study in the journal Science.

Human waste, like that from Cancun’s hotels and night spots, aggravates threats to coral worldwide, such as overzealous fishing, which hurts stocks of fish that eat reef-damaging algae. Coral reefs are covered with tiny animals called coral polyps, which build the reefs by slowly secreting calcium carbonate over thousands of years, creating structures that can dull the blow hurricanes deal to coastal cities. The polyps also give the reefs their dazzling shades of pink and purple.

Across the Caribbean, the amount of reef surface covered by live coral has fallen about 80% in the past 30 years, the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network says.

In the Pacific, between Hawaii and Indonesia, reefs have been losing about 1% of their coral coverage annually over the past 25 years. He concludes that it is hard to tell how much of that damage was caused by global warming and how much by local factors such as pollution. Thus rather than people continuing to brood over global warming and its environmental repercussions, more attention need to be given to other environmental issues whose effects might dwarf those of global warming.