Global warming will have major impact on US and worldwide tourism

It’s generally recognized that tourism is a major source of global warming, accounting for about 5% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, so what’s the implications for the future?

Imagine a ski resort whose chairlifts are in the lower reaches of mountains, without decent snow. Or a scuba club whose reefs succumbed to warmer and stormier seas. Or a golfing hotel in a district where water shortages made it impossible to keep fairways green.

“All are real possibilities, industry experts say, and in fact, early effects are already being felt,” said the International Herald Tribune.

The United Nations convened a conference, “Climate Change and Tourism,” for tour operators and officials from nearly 100 countries to discuss the impact of global warming on their livelihoods.

“The tourism industry must adapt rapidly,” the final report concluded.

“The entire tourism product will be affected – every destination has a climate-related component,” Geoffrey Lipman, assistant secretary general of the UN World Tourism Organization, said by telephone from the meeting, held in Davos, Switzerland. If the climate is going to change, “which we know it will, we’d all better adapt,” he said. He added:

“Some people are going to find that they had tourism before and don’t now. In the Canadian Rockies it may be the reverse.”

For some destinations, both warm and cold, climate change is already having an impact on tourism and planning.

At the Whistler Blackcomb Ski Resort in Canada, for example, glaciers are receding and good snow is found higher up the mountain than 10 years ago.

“We’ve been building lifts higher, in more snow-reliant zones to give us more stability,” said Arthur De Jong, the mountain planning and environment resource manager at the resort.

Ski lifts last 25 years, Mr De Jong said.

To decide where to place new ones, the resort has run a mix of computer simulations to try to determine where the snow will be depending on varying calculations of how much the temperature might rise over 30 years.

Air travel worldwide may be particularly impacted.

“It’s nice to talk about reducing air travel but many nation states depend on it,” said a spokesman for the UN tourism organization. “Think about what happens to New Zealand and Australia. More important, what happens to poor countries – the Maldives, Seychelles and Africa – who need it because it is the only way to get tourists in.”

Report by David Wilkening