Summer Getaway Special

A brush with a Corfu wildfire shows what everyone's life will be like in the 2020's.

At EdenLab, the Sustainability Innovation company we don’t do fires or floods or fear.

There’s plenty of that in your feeds already.

But an uncomfortably close experience of a wildfire gave me an insight into what we’re all going to experience, wherever we are, over the next 5 to 10 years.

So this post is unfortunately but realistically about what that's going to be like and the coming boom in resilience and adaptation services.

The first thing you notice is a snowflake

Except you quickly realise it’s ash fluttering through the air.

Then you notice yellow-brown smoke rising over the hill behind you.

Over the course of a sweltering afternoon, the smoke thickens and thickens as does your unease.

When darkness comes, you realise the orange glow in the night sky comes from the flames below.?

Just in case, you quietly pack a few small bags, all while presenting an unflustered vibe to the kids.

It’s midnight, you think about going to bed.

Then the Emergency Alert screeches out of your phone and it’s time to leave. Like Right Now.

This is not a Zombie Apocalypse movie. And then it is.        

You get into the ash-covered hire car but the roads are completely empty, this is not a Zombie Apocalypse movie.

And then it is.

As you hit a traffic line of holiday makers all crawling their way down the one road that leads away from the fires to the coast.

Coming the other way, firetrucks and bus after bus after bus, hazards blinking, heading-up to evacuate people stuck at the big resorts.

This really was a ‘Summer Getaway’?        

Mercifully no one lost their life in the Corfu fires, though hundreds of thousands of acres of trees and animals were wiped-out.

2,500 people were able to make an orderly getaway and unlike in Rhodes or Maui, no one died.

‘Heathrow, we have a problem.’

Tourism and air travel is growing faster than ever, set to smash all records in the coming decades. Travelling is clearly a kind of consumption.

But there are things that can be done to make travel more sustainable.

From retrofitting hotels to make them more sustainable, designing No Food Waste programmes, choosing lower emissions flights, ride-sharing ground transportation, renting bikes not cars, building a common travel impact data platform but the elephant in the room is the plane.?

The elephant in the room is the plane        

Despite recent advances using AI reduce flight emissions, makers like Boeing predict ultra-low emission hydrogen electric flight at scale won’t be until the 2050’s.

Let’s hope they lack vision.

Getaways aren’t just for holidaymakers

More and more of us are going to find ourselves caught by surprise in fires, floods, heat domes and storms as climate breakdown becomes more widespread.

Clutching just a few belongings, not knowing where you’re going to spend the night, competing for the few remaining beds, having to completely rethink your plans, perhaps you lost precious belongings in a rushed escape?

Suddenly you’ll be a climate migrant too.

That means uncomfortable feelings for people who until now have seen climate change as something happening to ‘other people’ far away.

The coming boom in Resilience Services

In the face of the terrifying power of the natural world in chaos, we’ll experience uncertainty, indecision, inconvenience, confusion, frustration and fear.

People will pay to avoid those feelings.

They will stop travelling to wildfire zones over the summer months.

They’ll be looking for help to get back on their feet quickly. They’ll be looking to avoid risk in the first place.

What might that look like?

Travel can be a force for good

Travel can make people more open-minded, tolerant and empathetic, enabling cross-cultural understanding.

It redistributes tourist dollars, creates life-affirming experiences, gives vitamin-D deficient people a burst of solar-powered health.

A more sustainable, lower-footfall tourism can help support the environment and local communities.

There are many for whom one week by the pool in the sun makes life worth living and gets them through the daily grind.

It’s not one of life’s essentials but it can sure feel like one.

Perhaps one day we’ll end-up with no international travel and tourism. Certainly far fewer flights.

Trains are the future. If only the cost was the same as flying.

That will change in the next decade and I’m excited by the rebirth of the ‘Sleeper’ night service.

Perhaps the joys of domestic travel will outweigh the pain, risk, hassle and uncertainty of travel to once hotter destinations?

Until that comes to pass, there’s work to do to rapidly lower the impact of travel and tourism. There sector is waking-up to it, but far too slowly.

If you’re interested in designing solutions that lower the impact of travel and tourism or passionate about helping accelerate the transition, then please get in touch!

Thanks for reading. Special thanks to Helen Armstrong Nic Owen Ruth Bates Siobhann Mansel-Pleydell for conscious or unconscious inspiration.

I am always keen to hear your comments, thoughts and suggestions. Plus of course we want to work with you to be the change.

Leo