Fri, Jul 21, 2023 page9

• Climate change is only beginning to mess up your holidays

  • By Lara Williams / Bloomberg Opinion
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  Anyone starting the summer holidays with a trip to the Mediterranean would have been greeted by back-to-back heat waves, starting with Cerberus, aptly named by Italian meteorologists after the three-headed hound of Hades that guards the gates of the underworld in Greek mythology.

  This week’s scorcher, called Charon, is pushing temperatures as high as 48°C in Sardinia and Sicily. Greece and Spain are also expected to feel heat into the 40s. Thanks to the climate crisis, these extremes are no longer so unusual. That raises questions over whether our tourist hotspots and peak-travel times would remain so in the coming years, and how the industry would cope.

  This heat is dangerous — one 44-year-old road worker has already died in Italy’s extreme heat, and it is likely more casualties would be seen. A study calculated there were 61,000 heat-related deaths last summer, as Europe baked,

  However, tourists can stay comfortable, for example, by taking a day trip to the mountains or sheltering in an air-conditioned hotel room.

  Any conversation about tourism and climate change is complicated by the fact that the industry itself is a driver of greenhouse gases. How do people continue to support something that brings them joy and provides many with economic lifelines while slashing carbon emissions? The question is urgent — one I am not going to cover in this piece — but the issue is front and center: Airlines are investing billions on decarbonization, and low-carbon alternatives, such as train travel, are becoming more popular as governments push them.

  Tourism accounted for 7.6 percent of global gross domestic product last year, down from 10.4 percent in 2019, though some countries, such as the Maldives and Greece, are particularly exposed — 28 percent and 25 percent respectively of their gross domestic product comes from tourism.

  Pausing international travel during the COVID-19 pandemic brought benefits such as cleaner air and water to some areas, but the economic losses also deepened poverty in particularly vulnerable places such as Bangladesh and Uganda, leading to increased animal poaching and deforestation during lockdowns. So it is important to look at how a changing climate might shift tourism patterns, affect local businesses and potentially derail sustainable development.

  How are things changing? People do not seem to have been put off traveling this year. My colleague Andrea Felsted wrote that “airlines, hotels and tour operators are facing another sizzling summer of travel,” with Ryanair Holdings PLC, a specialist in short-haul hops around Europe, reporting record passenger numbers for last month. The biggest pressures for now might come from good weather back at home, meaning holidaymakers avoid going abroad, and the cost-of-living crisis.

  There has also been a shift toward avoiding peak seasons to cut costs. That might be driven by finances, but with oppressive, dangerous heat events set to become more intense and frequent, early fall and spring could become even more popular. One study looking at the effects of climate change on the Holiday Climate Index — a measure of favorable tourist weather — found that locations such as Antalya, Turkey, would become dangerously hot in the summer months by the end of the century, with the weather in the shoulder season being more desirable.

  Summer travelers might instead increasingly look to cooler climes, or alternatives to typical beach and city escapes, such as mountainous regions. Adventure travel is a growing sector, projected to expand at a compound annual rate of 15.2 percent from last year to 2030, but these trips are also being affected by climate change, from more frequent wildfires to unpredictable snowfall and intensifying rainy seasons.

  Tour operators and guides are under pressure to deal with new risks and heightened unpredictability. While they have always worked hard on safety, many are having to deal with more unpredictable conditions in all seasons. One operator in Argentina said in an email that, although the Andes is a challenge all year round, the summer rains — during the northern hemisphere winter — are becoming more extreme and making roads more difficult to pass through. In the Alps, the crisis is making mountaineering more dangerous, due to rocks coming loose as ice melts. At the extreme adventure tourism end, Nepal’s head of tourism blamed climate change for making this year one of the deadliest years on record for climbing Mount Everest.

  The climate crisis is messing up winters too. A lot has been written about ski resorts and the lack of snow. I visited Scotland in February to do some winter walking, but the freezing point was much higher than it normally would be for that time of year, meaning our guide had to go further up to find good snow to teach us vital skills. At the summit of one mountain, two experienced climbers remarked how sad and unusual it was that there was no need for crampons. It is not hard to imagine the winter season being drastically reduced in the future, and either reducing the amount of available winter guiding work — or pushing everyone to get up into the mountains for the brief period in which conditions are right.

  The key is flexibility. Ski resorts have been trying to become four-season destinations for years, but the importance of that is shifting as winter snow becomes less reliable: “It used to be a nice-to-have for resorts, something to aspire to for a business reason,” Christina Beckmann, co-founder of Tomorrow’s Air and vice president of the Adventure Travel Trade Association, explained to me. “Now, it’s an imperative.”

  The tourism industry is not going to change overnight — there are reasons other than climate for why people travel when they do, such as school holidays, second properties and family reunions — but it would, undoubtedly, be altered. The industry would need to be ready to adapt.

  Lara Williams is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering climate change. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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