Tourism and the Implications of Climate Change: Issues and Actions
Edited by Christian Schott, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Emerald Group, Hardback, 384 pp, 20 Dec 2010, ISBN 978-0-85724-619-6
The volume, third in the series 'Bridging Tourism Theory and Practice' aims to serve as a platform for ‘knowledge exchange’ for academics and practitioners dealing with climate change and a range of disciplines, including anthropology, climatology, psychology, transport studies and of course tourism & hospitality. Compiled by 30 authors (from 10 countries) who are tourism academics, industry people and consultants, and two of which are climate scientists. The latter provide a very useful summary of the work of the IPCC and also of UNWTO in relation to future scenarios of climate change impacts on tourism. Other chapters deal with technological innovation in transport, the reaction of hotel chains and of the cruise sector to climate change, and there are useful case studies from ‘the tourism-dependent island nation’ of New Zealand presenting mitigation initiatives in the hospitality sector, as well as public and private sector responses. On the quantitative side a chapter is dedicated to estimating the Australian tourism industry’s Green house gas (GHG) footprint, while on the qualitative, an innovative ‘cyber-ethnographical’ approach seeks to explore climate change concern in online communities. Chapter 13, written by ECOCLUB.com Members Dodds and Graci, presents a case study about their NGO, The Icarus Foundation and the lessons learned in relation to the constraints of climate change awareness-building. The last (fourth) section of the book takes a realistic-pessimistic attitude and focuses on possible adaptation strategies, how tourism services and products may survive or even benefit(!) from climate change. The penultimate chapter deals with GreenEarth.travel, a think tank dealing with the greening of tourism destinations.
Among the more memorable points and conclusions are that Climate Change has similarities with Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” theory, that technology cannot by itself solve the crisis, that there are both real and psychological barriers to adaptation and mitigation in both demand and supply sides, that complex interrelationships between climate change and tourism are little understood, that greenwashing is commonplace in the cruise sector and among eco labels in general.
The editor rightly recognizes that the contributions (and viewpoints) are all from ‘developed’ countries, so future volumes would need to take in ‘southern’ viewpoints, since it is the global south that will be bearing the brunt of climate change, on top of its current burdens. That said, this a valuable reference work (including 44 pages of references) with a lot of thinking and research behind it and many leads for the reader, who after reading this book, will probably deduce that in relation to climate change the world, and the tourism sector, is in a mode of ‘panic in slow motion’, many disconnected initiatives and talk but few results. Something is missing and this is perhaps the political will to tackle the climate crisis as an economic system crisis, and take real steps towards a new, green, direct democratic and socially just global economic system that may provide the solutions that productivist models, neoliberal dogma and the neo-colonial scramble for scarce industrial resources just cannot.