When will Africa & South East Asia get the chance to attract tourists, without negative weather forecasts?

Introduction

Because of the climate change there will be major disruptions in the global food system, adaption to those changes needs to begin immediately, experts say.

If this is not going to change there will be huge problem for one- fifth of the world’s population because people can starve and million of others will become climate refugees, forced by heat and drought to abandon their lands and hunt for food elsewhere in the coming decades. David Lobell (researcher) says: “To prevent this nightmare future, the world community should focus its efforts where climate threats are likely to make the greatest impacts. We used historical data to determine what food- producing regions of the world were most sensitive to changes in temperature and rainfall. Impoverished regions of Southern Africa and South Asia will be hit first and hardest in climate change.”

Original article: http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=41041 by Stephan Leahy, Brooklin, Canada February 1 2008

Essay by Preeti Kerah
Master in Tourism Destination Management student 2008/2009

Climate change is any long- term significant change in the “average weather” that a given region experiences. Average weather may include average weather may include average temperature, precipitation and wind patterns. These changes can be caused by dynamic processes on earth, external forced including variations in sunlight intensity and not to forget the recently human activities. Africa and South- East Asia are not the only parts in the world which will suffer from extreme climate change. Central America and Brazil are the other risk hot spots which can suffer extreme weather changes in the future. There has been done analysis of Southern Africa which shows that: “Southern Africa could face a 30- percent decline in maize production in the next 2 decades. Productions of other staples like millet ad rice are projected to fall by at least 10 percent. Tourism has been both a victim and a vector of global climate change. One said: “The tourism sector has also become a non- negligible contributor to climate change through greenhouse-gas emissions largely from the transport and accommodation of tourists- as much as 5 per cent of all carbon dioxide emissions from human activities”. These kinds of changes have a really bad Impact on tourists because people start having negative thoughts of a particular destination. When I personally make the choice for or against a tourism destination it is influenced by:

• Attractiveness (e.g. nature, climate, landscape and places of cultural interest)
• Available facilities ( accommodations)
• Accessibility

Climate and weather are important factors in choice of destination. These factors influence the attractiveness of a potential vacation region (good weather and plenty of sunshine are the most important expectations in connection with vacations).

The tourism sector is not the only sector which suffers from the climate change but even the agriculture sector and the local community is facing loads of problems. It is said that: “Knowing these regions will only become hotter and drier provides a target for adaption. However, making changes in agriculture and food production is difficult and complex”. As reported by IPS last September, 100,000 square kilometers of land becomes degraded or turns into desert every year. On one hand climate changes can have negative impacts and on the other hand it has positive impacts. In countries like Canada and Russia climate change is expected to boost agriculture output, these countries will have longer growing seasons. Africa and South East Asia are going through global warming this means that many dry areas are going to get drier and wet areas are going to get wetter. They are going to be caught between drought and seas of floods. Because of the climate change last year there were more than 25 million people in Africa which have faced food crisis. The rich people don’t suffer that much rather than the poor people in South East Asia because for them agriculture is the source of income and once that is not possible or destroyed they’ll starve. I personally think that there should be done something about this issue because otherwise there will be a plenty of innocent people which will die. “Innovations in policy are needed – not in technology” said Geoff Tansey a food policy researcher. As said earlier the tourism industry in these regions will go down because of the distractive future reports for these destinations.