Tourism and Climate Change

Impacts, Adaptation and Mitigation

Daniel Scott, C. Michael Hall, Gossling Stefan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136462924
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Hostelería, viajes y turismo

Climate change is the single most important global environmental and development issue facing the world today and has emerged as a major topic in tourism studies. Climate change is already affecting the tourism industry and is anticipated to have profound implications for tourism in the twenty-first century, including consumer holiday choices, the geographic patterns of tourism demand, the competitiveness and sustainability of destinations and the contribution of tourism to international development.

Tourism and Climate Change: Impacts, Adaptation and Mitigation is the first book to provide a comprehensive overview of the theory and practice of climate change and tourism at the tourist, enterprise, destination and global scales. Major themes include the implications of climate change and climate policy for tourism sectors and destinations around the world, tourist perceptions of climate change impacts, tourism's global contribution to climate change, adaptation and mitigation responses by all major tourism stakeholders, and the integral links between climate change and sustainable tourism. It combines a thorough scientific assessment of the climate-tourism interrelationships with discussion of emerging mitigation and adaptation practice, showcasing international examples throughout the tourism sector as well as actions by other sectors that will have important implications for tourism.

Written by three leading academics in this field, this critical contribution highlights the challenges of climate change within the tourism community and provides a foundation for decision making for both reducing the risks, and taking advantage of the opportunities, associated with climate change. This comprehensive discussion of the complexities of climate change and tourism is essential reading for students, academics, business leaders and government policy makers.

1 Introduction

This chapter provides a brief introduction to the subject of tourism and climate change and provides a framework for the rest of the book. It outlines some of the key concepts that help us understand the relationship between tourism and climate change. This includes a brief overview not only of the science of climate change and how it has developed, but also of the notion of a tourism system, and how climate change issues are part of broader concerns about how to make tourism sustainable. The chapter concludes with an overview of the book’s structure.

THE CHALLENGE OF CLIMATE CHANGE AND TOURISM

Climate change is arguably one of the most important issues facing the world today. It is also probably one of the most contentious. Not only do many people have an interest in the topic and often some quite firm viewpoints, but also it is a major issue in international diplomatic, business and scientific discussion. When reading a quality newspaper such as The Guardian, The Washington Post or Le Monde, barely a day goes by without an article on some aspect of climate change. The issue also features regularly on the television screen and on talk radio, where everybody seems to be talking about the weather, how strange it is (somewhere), how it might be changing, and why.

Travel and tourism is also a seemingly ubiquitous topic of conversation and media coverage. From television programmes on dream holiday getaways through to regular newspaper coverage on destinations and attractions, the prospect of travel seems never far away. In most countries with satellite or cable television, there are even channels completely dedicated to travel, while the close relationship between tourism and the weather is indicated by coverage of the weather in major international destinations in most national newspapers, television news and weather channels.

From all this media coverage, you would probably think it would be easy to put together a book on tourism and climate change. But actually, no, it isn’t. This is because we are often dealing with many taken-for-granted assumptions as to what tourism – and climate change – is. After all, everyone who will pick up this book has experienced both climate and travel. We are not suggesting, of course, that personal knowledge of climate and tourism is of little value, far from it. Indeed, it is a vital part of understanding the puzzle of how tourists experience and perceive weather and climate, and hence incorporate it into their travel decisions. However, in this book we also want to move beyond the individual experience to try and gain an appreciation of the bigger picture of the multiple and complex relationships between tourism and climate, and climate change, at the levels of tourists, destinations, countries, and the planet as a whole. We believe this is important not only for improving understanding of the interrelationships between tourism and climate change, but also to understand better the behaviour of governments, businesses and tourists – our behaviour – in light of a growing awareness of the environmental consequences of travel.

A key role of this book, then, is not only to provide a systematic overview of the interrelationships between tourism and climate change, but also to critique what we know about these interrelationships, and to ask some difficult questions about what the future might look like for the tourism industry, destinations and individual travellers in an environmentally constrained world. Like other areas of climate change research and policy, tourism has seen its share of early speculation and contrasting perspectives, which demand careful, information-based consideration. A central objective of this book is to provide a much needed critical reflection on the first 25 years of climate change and tourism research and practice.

Tourism is currently considered one of the major global economic sectors that are least prepared for climate change. Consequently, this book is designed to inform all tourism stakeholders (government, business, non-governmental organizations, international development agencies and their donors, and academe) about the transformative challenges that climate change poses for tourism. Most importantly, however, this book is aimed principally at the tourism students and young professionals who will experience first-hand the full range of climate change effects on tourism destinations and businesses, and will be the innovators and decision-makers who determine the responses of the tourism community to climate change and its associated risks and opportunities.

As it is a multidisciplinary field of research, a common language for researchers, tourism stakeholders and climate change practitioners is also important. Tourism scholars need to use the terms of climate change science and policy-making correctly. There are recent examples from climate change-related publications in tourism journals and books where the central responses of mitigation and adaptation are not correctly differentiated, or that refer to ‘radioactive forcing’ instead of ‘radiative forcing’ (see Box 1.2). Scholars from other fields similarly need to utilize correctly the concepts and terminology of the tourism sector they purport to study. To facilitate improved collaboration going forward, this book defines tourism, climate change and other key terms and concepts within each chapter.

Before moving on to discuss the interrelationships between tourism and climate change, we first provide an introduction to how we understand tourism and its impacts on society and the environment, as well as a brief review of the science of climate change and the international response to this vital development challenge.

TOURISM 101: UNDERSTANDING TOURISM AND ITS IMPACTS

Tourism is a ‘slippery’, ‘fuzzy’ concept (Markusen 1999). It is relatively easy to visualize, yet difficult to define with precision because its meaning changes depending on the context of its analysis, purpose and use. Tourism is therefore a concept that, while initially appearing very easy to define, is actually quite complex, with a substantial literature just on the issue of its definition (see Coles et al. 2005; Smith 2004; Hall and Lew 2009). Much of the problem with considering the concept of tourism is that most people think of tourism just in terms of leisure travel or being on a holiday or vacation. However, as Figure 1.1 illustrates, the concept is much wider than that.

Figure 1.1 Popular and academic conceptions of tourism

Source: Hall and Lew (2009)

Three types of tourism are usually recognized with respect to tourism statistics:

• domestic tourism, which includes the activities of resident visitors within their home country or economy, either as part of a domestic or an international trip;

• inbound tourism, which includes the activities of non-resident visitors within the destination country or economy, either as part of a domestic or an international trip (from the perspective of the traveller’s country of residence);

• outbound tourism, which includes the activities of resident visitors outside their home country or economy, either as part of a domestic or an international trip.

Confusion over the definition of tourism does not end here. The word ‘tourism’ is used to describe tourists (people who engage in voluntary return mobility), as well as the tourism industry (for-profit businesses, organizations and individuals that enable tourists to travel). And, to complicate matters further, ‘tourism’ (or the tourism sector) is also used to refer to the whole social and economic phenomenon of tourism, including tourists, the tourism industry, governmental and non-governmental organizations, and the people and places that comprise tourism destinations and landscapes (Hall and Lew 2009).

Tourism products and their consumption present further definitional challenges because many of them serve both tourists and non-tourists (Smith 2004). In particular:

• visitors consume both tourism and non-tourism commodities and services;

• locals (non-visitors) consume both tourism and non-tourism commodities and services;

• tourism industries produce (and often consume) both tourism and non-tourism commodities and services;

• non-tourism industries produce (and often consume) both tourism and non-tourism commodities and services.

In addition to the basic concepts of tourist and tourism, several other seemingly simple terms require surprisingly complicated definitions to understand the positive and negative impacts of tourism on destinations and societies. For example, the concept of the ‘home’ or ‘usual’ environment or economy of an individual tourist is an important dimension of tourism definitions and statistics. It refers to the geographical (spatial or jurisdictional) boundaries within which an individual routinely moves in their regular daily life. Tourism exists outside the home environment. The United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO 1994) recommends that an international tourist be defined as:

a visitor who travels to a country other than that in which he or she has his or her usual residence for at least one night but not more than one year, and whose main purpose of visit is other than the exercise of an activity remunerated from within the country visited.

Although the terms are not used consistently around the world, those who do not stay away from their usual residence for at least one night are called excursionists or day-trippers, or in some cases recreationists. One of the consequences of increased access to fast-transport technology, such as jet aircraft and high-speed trains, is that trips that a number of years ago would have had to be undertaken as an overnight trip can now be done as a day-trip (Hall 2005).

The term trip is also used extensively in tourism studies, and refers to the movement of an individual outside their home environment until they return. The term actually refers to a ‘round trip’. The trip concept, and its implications for understanding impacts, can be understood through what is referred to as the tourism system, usually conceptualized as a spatial system (Hall and Page 2006; Hall 2008b). The tourism system includes the various elements that make up a trip: the generation or origin region (or place) of the tourist, the transit region through which the tourist travels, the destination where the tourist is going, and the environment in which these exist (Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2 Elements of a geographical tourism system

The notion of a tourism system is extremely important when we start to consider the notion of impacts. If we are to evaluate the effects of tourist trips, we need not only to examine where in the system immediate impacts occur (local effects), but also to consider if there are system-wide effects that contribute to change in the broader environment. In the case of maritime ship emissions, for example, nitrogen oxides (NOx) have both local and global impacts on atmospheric pollution. In the Los Angeles–Long Beach area of California, which is both the United States’ busiest port and the country’s most polluted area, oceangoing vessels are among the largest sources of NOx, emitting more NOx than all power plants and refineries in the region’s air basin combined. This is significant because, as well as being a greenhouse gas (GHG) that contributes to global warming and climate change, NOx reacts with volatile organic compounds in the atmosphere to produce ozone/smog. Particulates from marine vessels also create significant cancer risks, with an estimated more than 700 premature deaths caused in the Los Angeles area annually by these emissions, as of 2008 (testimony of Barry R. Wallerstein, Executive Officer, South Coast Air Quality Management District at Legislative Hearing on the Marine Vessel Emissions Reduction Act of 2007, S. 1499, US Senate, Committee on Environment and Public Works, 14 February 2008, in McCarthy 2009: 1). Because of their often localized nature, the effects of NOx are felt not just in ports, but also along shipping transit routes. For example, Santa Barbara County in California, ‘which has no commercial ports, estimates that by 2020, 67 percent of its NOx inventory will come from shipping traffic transiting the California coast’ (testimony of Bryan Wood-Thomas, US EPA, Office of Transportation and Air Quality, at Legislative Hearing on the Marine Vessel Emissions Reduction Act of 2007, S. 1499, US Senate, Committee on Environment and Public Works, 14 February 2008, in McCarthy 2009: 3). (See chapters 3 and 4 for a more detailed discussion of maritime emissions.)

One historical difficulty in examining the effects of tourism is that studies have tended to examine impacts only in terms of one element of a tourism system, usually the destination, rather than examining the environmental effects of a tourism system as a whole (Hall 2004; Hall and Lew 2009). However, clearly people have to leave from their home environment, travel to the destination, and return. Therefore it is nonsensical to examine the effects of tourism by looking only at destinations. This is not to suggest, of course, that destination impacts are unimportant – they clearly are; rather, it is to highlight that the impacts of tourism go beyond the destination and may even be global in scale, as well as affecting different parts of the tourism system in different ways. As we examine in chapter 5, the impacts associated with climate change exemplify these issues of scale and the need for systems thinking with respect to the assessment of tourism and its role in sustainable development.

CHANGE HAPPENS

The global environment is always changing, a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Boxes
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and acronyms
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Why is climate important for tourism?
• 3. Growth in tourism, mobility and emissions of greenhouse gases
• 4. Carbon management: Climate change mitigation in the tourism sector
• 5. Climate change impacts on destinations
• 6. Government, industry and destination adaptation to climate change
• 7. Consumer behaviour and tourism demand responses to climate change
• 8. Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index