Why are destinations so hesitant to face climate change?

What is it going to take for leaders in the tourism industry to take their minds off big data and digitalisation and focus on exactly when and how we are going to reduce our carbon emissions by 10% every year while growing the net value/benefits to the host places, individuals and enterprises?

The lecture given by the courageous 15 year old Swedish girl, Greta Thunberg, to the wealthy elite in Davos met with stunned silence and muted applause from the one audience with the power, influence and authority to act. 

The presentation given by Kevin Anderson, the UK’s top climate scientist to the WTM in 2015, had a similar effect - - climate change hasn’t figured prominently in those corridors since. Here’s my account of that potentially historic day that fizzled with links to Dr. Anderson's speech.

But outside the tourism bubble, change is picking up speed and even though our political leaders are easily distracted, public awareness of the dangers of procrastination is mounting thanks in large part to the harsh reality of the latest IPCC reports; the mounting evidence of extreme weather and biodiversity loss; the protests of children striking school and taking to the streets. The movement to encourage public disinvestment in fossil fuel companies that was nothing more than an idea in 2012, has since extracted US$6 trillion in investment. Support for a Green New Deal in the US, championed by the newly-elected, youngest Congresswoman in the US, is steadily gaining ground. 

While trying to figure out why the sector I serve seems so hesitant to step forth, I came across this recent article in the Washington post  titled “Everything is not going to be okay’: How to live with constant reminders that the Earth is in trouble.”  The author, Dan Zak, questions the usefulness of  applying a band aid that’s often applied to deal with most of life’s  challenges. Zak quotes a NASA scientist who says “We want there to be a really simple story: You do this, and then everything will be okay but everything is not going to be okay.” Zak  then goes on to observe:

“That’s the opposite of what a mother says, the opposite of what we all tell each other about the latest worry — about the job interview in the morning, about the lump in your wife’s breast, about a report in the newspaper screaming through a muffle of data  that we need to stop everything we’re doing and pull together in the same direction, or else everything we are building for our children may soon be overtaken by water or fire. Everything will be okay. We say it even when we don’t believe it.”

Neither does the 15 year-old Swedish activist Greta Thumberg nor a growing army of children who are taking to the streets around the world believe it.  They don’t care about being popular with their teachers, parents or anyone in control.

By contrast, the tourism industry seems to be deploying the same “everything will be ok” response, so long as we start pursuing a few of the Sustainable Development Goals 

So I set to asking myself - why is this the case?  Why do we in tourism so dread bad news and are quick to scold purveyors of doom and gloom? I came up with the following:

1. The nature of what we sell renders us ill equipped to deal with bad news. Our leisure customers are spending heard-earned disposable income and time on escape, rest & recreation, while seeking to chill or find fun, adventure, romance and personal growth, or all of the above and more. Their choice of destination is to all intents and purposes infinite. Why would we bother them with any facts that might spoil their quest for pleasure or distract them from choosing us? 

2 .We’re dealing with enough risk as it is. Suppliers are selling a time and place-specific experience that cannot be stockpiled and its delivery involves defying both gravity and inertia – we have to persuade our customers to leave the familiar comfort of their homes and be transported to an unfamiliar new place offering strange new food, landscapes, language, and security. 

The risks to both guest and host are unusually high. The only real outcome or "take away" for the guest is an ephemeral memory that drives a propensity to return, refer or recommend. In today’s inter-connected world dominated by social media, ensuring that those memories are highly positive is a key driver of host and destination success. 

No wonder then that most marketing is dominated by public relations and the capacity to sustain an appealing image in the minds of guests before, during and after a visit. In this case, PR might well stand for Positive Reputation. 

3. We depend on funding from the public sector to underwrite our critically important marketing campaigns. Politicians, who keep those purses,  are also highly allergic to bad news or negative messaging of any kind. As Dr. Becken has also pointed out, neither government funded institutions nor academia are inclined to challenge the status quo for fear of upsetting the powers that enable their existence.

4. We believe we’re powerless to change the status quo. Since the global economy depends on the free movement of goods and people, perhaps we can just keep our heads down and hope no one notices. 

We’re not an industry in which function and power are tightly coupled in vertically integrated heirarchies with “captains of industry” at the top who have sufficient power and action to steer its direction. Global tourism and hospitality is a world-wide network of loosely connected, self-organising agents, dependent on each other, but each is programmed to look after their own self interests.  (In Europe, where commercial tourism & hospitality have been practiced longer than anywhere else, some 98% of enterprises are still small, or medium-sized). 

5. We don’t know what to do or how to act differently. We think we know how to bounce back after a crisis because once economies recover, or impediments to demand are lifted, there’s always been a rising demand to travel. Most of the people employed in tourism are sales or service-oriented and have not had the chance to develop very practical, operational solving skills that lead to improvements in efficiency and productivity. Tourism is a secondary, derivative industry in many ways – a user of facilities and services created by engineers, architects, and designers who serve and supply services to tourism but have no direct responsibility for it. As a consequence of all these factors, the proportion of participants in tourism & hospitality who understand what's actually involved in reducing carbon, other waste and resource use etc., is either too small or too junior to make a difference.

Fortunately I am not alone in asking this question of tourism. Last month Dr. Susanne Becken delivered a powerful presentation in Auckland last month at the Tourism and Sustainable Development Goals conference exploring the same issue. Dr. Becken has also published this paper: Businesses think they’re on top of the carbon risk – destinations haven’t a clue. 

I’m writing this in Krakow, Poland after keynoting an ETC conference titled: Managing Sustainable Tourism Growthand incidentally, climate change isn’t on the agenda although overtourism is. We’re only a mere 49 miles from Auschwitz-Birkenau -- proof that everything is not ok for many at certain times in history. Neville Chamberlain believed up to Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939 that everything might just turn out alright. It did eventually, but at the cost of millions of lives and huge destruction. 

So what’s my point? 

Our generation has a responsibility to live up to the challenge of our times and acknowledge that we are being asked to make an enormous leap into a different future. Acknowledging the complexity and scale of the issues and being prepared to delve into root causes is step one. We’ll only do that once we overcome the fear and anxiety of not necessarily knowing how and make it OK to talk about it. That’s why asking critical questions at this time and assigning time to reflecting quality time to the answers is critical. As Zak  observes “To grasp the problem, we have to slow down. To respond to it, we have to act fast.”

Yes, it is true there is no shortage of conferences or papers with such subjects of climate change, waste, water, or overtourism on the agenda or mentioned in the table of contents. Sustainable tourism is a veritable growth industry. Every year, academic institutions which only recognised tourism as a legitimate subject for intellectual investigation in the 1980’s, are now churning out thousands of undergraduate and postgraduates with sustainable tourism on their resumes. The plethora of papers, articles, and posts encouraging and supporting the concept of “sustainable tourism” or even “sustainable tourism growth” continues to grow, even though all the evidence shows that the tourism & hospitality sector becomes less sustainable with every passing year. 

Given that we have a huge sector of the global economy that senses something is seriously wrong but seems to lack the skills, imagination or responsibility to do anything about it, it’s not surprising that denial, minimisation, deflection and blame fill the vacuum. At the same time, the number of individuals willing to dig deeper and question the fundamental causes of so many inter-related challenges (also known as wicked problems) can be counted on the fingers of few hands. The fact that the tourism sector has not yet managed to find a way to fund an independent think-tank focused on identifying, analysing, and communicating , in plain language,  the real issues that tourism affects and is affected by, is to me nothing short of a tragic travesty.

The reason I created the term Conscious Travel in 2011 was not to define a luxury market of mindful, truth seeking, wellness, vegan-inclined luxury tourists as Skift described here, but because I believe tourism desperately needs to wake up, become conscious, aware and alert to the profound changes in the context in which it operates and start doing some radical re-thinking about its future. 

At what was a very productive ETC meeting, only one question came up about climate change and that implied a sense of helplessness based on the belief that, as the emissions problem is primarily aviation-related and as the airlines have been skilled at avoiding responsibility, then there wasn’t much other parts of tourism, including destinations, could do. 

I beg to differ. There’s a whole lot that destinations could do to ensure that all the ground suppliers of accommodation, food & beverage, transport, attractions and events moved towards a zero waste, zero emissions target as fast as possible. Imagine how we would react if each destination were made responsible to pay for their share of the emissions associated with both inbound or domestic travel? Imagine if NTO’s added the function of “asset management and stewardship” to their role and function? 

Secondly, by focusing on increasing the yield or net positive impact from tourism to and within their boundaries, destinations wouldn’t need to increase the volume of visitors to achieve the same positive impact and would, at the same time, decrease the risk of congestion / overtourism and shorten the time it takes to achieve the emissions reduction targets.

So let’s stop avoiding the very large elephant called climate change and recognise its inter-relatedness with the equally challenging wicked problem called over tourism. Let’s stop blaming or pointing the finger at others and being defensive. That would be to copy the behaviour of the tobacco and now the oil and gas industry.  Yes, travel is key to the global economy, but unless the tourism ”industry” demonstrates it is doing everything within its power to reduce its footprint fast, while other sectors overtake us and shrink theirs faster, we may find ourselves losing the social licence we have taken for granted for so long. 

Finally, at the root of all five reasons given to explain our relative mutedness and hesitancy, there’s one really big one and that’s fear – fear of pain as we contemplate the harsh conditions we are leaving our descendants to cope with and an even more profound fear of loss. Most of us bounce between hope and fear every day but as Joel Brewer says in this moving interview that’s  a false choice because they are both true. I deliberately won’t paraphrase his words because they are so very powerful and uplifting and strongly urge any reader of this post to click on the link below, listen carefully, two or three times if necessary and perhaps share your feelings and response. The more we express our fear and vulnerability, the more space we create for good responses to emerge. 

Postscript: John Hagel, senior consultant at Deloitte, whose work I've admired for many years has just posted an insightful article called Feel the Fear that examines why so many of us are ironically afraid to express our fear so it comes out in other emotional forms and restricts our capacity to seize the many opportunities that are part of the change we're coping with. https://edgeperspectives.typepad.com/edge_perspectives/2019/01/feel-the-fear.html