Thoughtful Tourism Series I: Travels & Tribulations

By Ashley V.

For many of us, we love to travel and go on vacation, escaping the stress of our jobs and everyday life, especially during Covid. We all have daydreams of jet-setting off to tropical locations and basking in the sun while sipping Pina Coladas on the beach, but do we ever stop to recognize the consequences of our travel? Personally, over the past few years I have been torn over traveling because of the environmental impact and its known contributions to climate change. I thought it would be best that I didn’t travel or take any significant flights, but in this day and age that is an unrealistic expectation. 

As someone who considers herself very eco-conscious, I still have a hard time not traveling and I imagine many other folks have the same issue. So, I started to wonder, what really are the impacts of travel? What does it mean to travel sustainably? How can I travel more mindfully? This curiosity led to this blog series on travel and over the course of the next few weeks we will learn why the answers to these questions are not so cut and dry. 

We will start by diving into the pros and cons of travel, and allow you to make the best decisions for yourself now that you know both sides of the coin. 

Let’s start with the cons and rip this bandage off quickly. 

1. Contributes to Climate Change – As we travel around the world, exploring new places we are releasing large amounts of greenhouse gases that contribute to the warming of our planet and exacerbate climate change. Tourism alone is responsible for roughly 8% of the world’s carbon emissions.¹ This creates a lose-lose system where the more we travel, the more we contribute to climate change, and the more travel destinations are impacted. For example, as climate change continues, sea levels rise causing many coastal destinations to be impacted, altered, and destroyed, ruining their travel appeal all together. Same for winter and ski destinations. The largest parts of travel that contribute to climate change are the methods of transportation, how we are getting from one destination to another. The Sustainable Travel International Organization provides great data and graphics that can show us exactly where we are releasing the most carbon emissions. 

2. Environmental Degradation – As we travel near and far to incredible destinations, we are entering sensitive ecosystems that might not be able to handle the impacts of high human traffic.The disruption to the natural environment and the pressure we put on those areas to support our basic human needs (infrastructure, water, food, waste, etc.) can interrupt important ecological functions. Do we ever stop to think about our impact of traveling to places where we could be overusing their resources? How about when we travel to drought prone places?  No matter where we go, we need resources to survive and our mere presence in a location can cause even further stress on fragile environments. 

3. Societal Implications – Our ability to move around the world as easily and frequently as we do, creates a lot of influence on the people and places we choose to visit. By traveling we can increase the cost of living in destinations, forcing local residents to move away from their homes and cut them off from their traditional lands and resources. The commodification of cultural and environmental items can lead to cultural loss and degraded sense of self within communities. Disrespectful visitors can cause hostility among locals and tourists, leading to crime, resentment and damaged resources. But, most importantly is the human trafficking that is taking place within the tourism industry by transporting their victims on planes, trains, buses and using hotel rooms to exploit vulnerable individuals.²  Human trafficking is the fastest growing and second largest criminal industry in the world, and the tourism industry holds a lot of power over human trafficking.³

4. Economic Problems – When you travel to a particular destination, how much of your money do you think is going into the local economy? Did you know that for every $100 you spend on a tour in a developing country, only $5 stays in the local economy?⁴ It is staggering how much of your money does not wind up in the hands of the locals. In fact, it has been shown that a disproportionately high amount of tourism revenues goes to those within a destination who are already wealthy.⁵ Let’s also keep in mind that only those will disposable incomes have the ability to travel, and the rich get to travel as much as they want, which contributes to climate change, and the poor will be the ones to suffer the brunt of those consequences. How is that fair? The people who travel the least will suffer the consequences the most from our travels? 

Now, I know this was a lot of information to digest and it was quite a debbie downer, but stay tuned for our next blog post on the pros to travel. I think you might be surprised at some of the reasons.

Sources: 

1 – https://stidevelopment.wpengine.com/issues/carbon-footprint-tourism/  

2 – https://wttc.org/Initiatives/Sustainable-Growth 

3 – https://itsapenalty.org/ 

4 – https://stidevelopment.wpengine.com/our-work/empower-communities/ 

5 – B. Bynum Boley (2015) To Travel or Not to Travel? Both Have Implications for Sustainable Tourism, Tourism Planning & Development, 12:2, 208-224, DOI: 10.1080/21568316.2014.925489