Skift Take
Ignorance of the science is no longer an excuse — the IPCC report makes sure of that. If the tourism industry doesn't snap out of its inertia faster, its fate will be sealed sooner than any of us thought.
From droughts to floods and fires, the unprecedented size and frequency of natural disasters the world has experienced will continue, each more cataclysmic than the last. And they will affect industries essential to the travel industry, as well as entire sectors such as winter tourism. But there’s still time to prevent worse outcomes through deep and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.
That’s essentially the message of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its sixth assessment report, Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis, released on Monday. Relying on the most advanced climate science to date, which makes these findings the most accurate yet in our lifetime, the report confirms that human activity is to blame for the warming of atmosphere, ocean and land.
“Based on the data that is now available, it behooves every political figure and every decision maker, be it in a company, be it in city government or national government, to look at their climate actions, to look at their emissions reductions, to assess how they can be a contributor, and to ensure that business as usual does not become the continuation,” said Inger Anderson, under secretary general of the United Nations and executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, at the IPCC virtual press conference.
The 4,000 page tome makes scant reference to the tourism industry per se, but it confirms that every inhabited region of the world will continue to experience further changes — faster sea level rises, increased droughts, more severe heatwaves, and complex monsoon patterns — that will impact health, agriculture, and infrastructure, among key sectors. All of these are, of course, essential to tourism operations.
In fact, perhaps no other industry has been as well positioned as tourism in witnessing and suffering the far-reaching impacts of climate change, the greatest threat to its raison d'etre:
