DAVOS – More tourists will stay at home over the next few decades and travel patterns will radically change, due to global warming, says experts meeting at a United Nations conference on climate change and tourism.
In a report for the conference, the UN Environment Programme, the World Meteorological Organisation and the World Tourism Organisation said that concerns about weather extremes and calls to reduce emissions-heavy travel would make longhaul flights less attractive.
According to the three bodies, travellers from Europe, Canada, the US and Japan are likely to spend more holidays in or near their home countries to take advantage of longer summers.
They project that global warming would reduce travel between northern Europe and the Mediterranean, between North America and the Caribbean, and between North-east Asia and South-east Asia.
“The geographic and seasonal redistribution of tourist demand may be very large for individual destinations and countries by mid- to late-century,” Reuters quoted the agencies as saying.
This shift, the agencies warned, would have important implications, “including proportionally more tourism spending in temperate nations and proportionally less spending in warmer nations now frequented by tourists from temperate regions”.
However, overall travel demand is expected to grow by between four and five percent a year with international arrivals doubling to 1.6 billion by 2020, the report adds.
