Lipman calls for climate travel summit

In an exclusive interview today, Lipman, now GreenEarth’s Creative Disruption Architect, called for new conference to re-invigorate and re-coordinate the travel and tourism industry’s attitude

Professor Geoffrey Lipman – at the top of the travel and tourism industry since his stint as Executive Director of IATA in the ’80s and as president of the World Travel and Tourism Council in the 90s, and a passionate advocate for green tourism development for well over 23 years – has called for tourism climate action now.

In an exclusive interview today, Lipman, now GreenEarth’s Creative Disruption Architect, called for new conference to re-invigorate and re-coordinate the travel and tourism industry’s attitude and actions towards the increasing and daily more imminent threat posed by climate change.

Next year, he infers, is critical – two climate change summits, in Paris and New York, will redefine Sustainable Development Goals and Carbon Reduction Targets. And the travel and tourism industry (or ‘Travelism’ as he calls it) needs to be in on the act and singing from the same songsheet.

Said Lipman "We have been involved as a sector but mostly too little and too slowly, because we’ve focused on growth and on measuring it – while referencing impacts without fully including them.  Or accounting for them..  And we’ve been driven by positioning not by joining the party – focused on our specifics, not our commonality. We still have some catching up to do – but we can do it as we have all the capabilities to do so."

"And that’s why I am suggesting we need a Davos style meeting like the one organized by UNWTO, WMO and UNEP in 2008 to prepare for the Copenhagen Climate Summit. To review the inventory of "sustainability and Climate related challenges, solutions in hand and change directions called for."

Valere Tjolle

READ FULL INTERVIEW

Valere Tjolle:

Major efforts have been made to engage the tourism industry with sustainable development over the last 22 years – starting with the Earth Summit, and Agenda 21 in 1992 followed by the Cape Town Declaration in 2002, followed by the Davos Declaration in 2007 and the Gothenburg Symposium in 2009. What is your opinion of their continuing success?

Professor Geoffrey Lipman

Can we start by calling it the Travelism Sector rather than simply the Tourism Industry?

Not because I want to invent a new word but to keep in perspective that when we talk about green growth (which is what this is all about) we keep focused on the scope (as well as the scale and size) of the system that is being referenced when WTTC tells us that it’s 9% of GDP, jobs and the like.

It’s not just ecotourism, it’s not just leisure travel, it’s not just international arrivals, it’s not just the visitor economy – it’s all of the above. Plus business travel, domestic journeys, two way trade and the massive sme driven service and value chains that engages millions of businesses and hundreds of millions of people. And it’s those inside the sector delivering the services and it’s those outside who are impacted and benefiting from the activity, including the consumers inside as well as the destinations and their residents who are engaged.  It’s the hard infrastructure like roads, railways, airports and ports: or planes, private cars and boats.: as well as the soft infrastructure like people and systems that make travel possible border clearance, health, regulation, security and the like.  To paraphrase VP Biden – it’s a big deal.

And it’s a language thing – it’s easier to say either travel or tourism and many people simply associate tourism with leisure, whereas the definition includes all travel. And most people simply don’t get the scale and scope thing – CNN’s Richard Quest (who does get it) once told me "explain that to my mother and keep her awake"). So when we set up WTTC in 1990 we deliberately called it the more cumbersome World Travel and Tourism Council and spent a whole decade with UNWTO, OECD and others creating the figures to explain its total economic impact in terms that finance Ministers could relate to.

But now in a twitter and text led communications era travelism simply says it all with less precious letters.

Now to answer your question. We’ve moved a long way as a society over half a century of big summits and big declarations with thousands of regional, national and local preparatory events responding to planetary and people sustainability needs. We have since the turn of this century been shifting to a triple bottom line approach – balancing social and environmental results with economic and in the last decade we’ve identified "green growth" to reflect mushrooming population, resource depletion, biodiversity conservation and increasingly climate impacts.

The events you mention cover sustainability generally and climate change specifically – yes the world is getting it right – with re-defining UN Summits in 2015 on Sustainable Development Goals and Carbon Reduction Targets. Yes I do think they will push the framework in the right direction.

We have been involved as a sector but mostly too little and too slowly, because we’ve focused on growth and on measuring it – while referencing impacts without fully including them.  Or accounting for them..  And we’ve been driven by positioning not by joining the party – focused on our specifics, not our commonality. We still have some catching up to do – but we can do it as we have all the capabilities to do so

And that’s why I am suggesting we need a Davos style meeting like the one organized by UNWTO, WMO and UNEP in 2008 to prepare for the Copenhagen Climate Summit. To review the inventory of "sustainability and Climate related challenges, solutions in hand and change directions called for.

VT: The Davos Declaration set out a terrible set of circumstances including flooding, bad weather conditions, overheating resorts, skiing cancelled, resorts decimated. Now that climate change has been recalibrated – what is the disaster potential for tourism? Sketch out your picture for a ‘business as usual’ approach.

GL: First the "disaster scenario" is the same as everyone else – simply because we are so big and so intertwined with everything. Second it’s more acute because we are so visible, so telegenic, and so newsworthy. Third we are quick to turn off and on – it’s easy to cancel a business trip or preplan a vacation.  Third our product is hyper weather sensitive and so much has been built near to the coast.

This is a creeping reality – where climate driven extremes of weather are the new norm along with the routine black swan economic (banking meltdown), political (Ukraine) social (Syrian refugees) and environmental (Gulf Oil Spill). But the creep is accelerating and so is its 24/7 hyperconnected visibility.

Finally business as usual will see traffic flows and growth slow; bankruptcies along the supply chain mushroom until we adapt our infrastructure and risk response mechanisms before it gets too late. The Davos Declaration also sets a solutions framework – but it was meant to be dynamic to serve as a sort of reference point for change.

VT: And over what sort of timescale will this play out?

GL: We need to revisit the Davos declaration framework now and update it and begin the sector revamp yesterday.

As a society we have to fix the temperature stability system now and that is what the 2015 Paris Summit is all about.

As a sector we need to start measuring and balancing our growth and benefits with our impacts (carbon, carrying capacity and human tolerance). We need an environmental impact satellite account as a starting point.

VT: The 2007 Davos Declaration sketched out a plan for action. In what respects, as an industry, have we failed to follow this agreed plan?

GL: Well it was never a plan (who is the governance?). It was a framework for mainstreaming the sector at global, regional, national and local levels. It was against objective analysis and with a truly inclusionary multi-stakeholder engagement. There was no mechanism for follow up and no funding. But that would be easy to fix, the stakes are high, the costs are moderate, technology is the enabler and there is money in public and private sector pockets

VT: What needs to be done now to avoid disaster?

GL: Reconvene the Davos meeting; rekindle the awareness/buy in/ commitment across the sector; create an up-to-date inventory of major issues and directions for change; build in a mechanism for routine review/ crisis management / take it to the 2015 Paris and New York Summits / institutionalize it to take on the results of those Summits/ integrate into market and regulatory actions by the sector going forward (with a big focus on destination effects & base of the pyramid inclusion)  & attract money through adapting traditional public sector finance & Impact Investment from the private side.

VT: Which industry sectors do you see as ‘getting it’ and which ones don’t?

GL: Aviation gets it – and big hotel chains and tour operators and the 5-10% of the market who are in ecotourism get some of it – by and large, the 80% of the businesses who are SME’s don’t. But getting it doesn’t necessarily mean making the changes in a strategic, coherent way. Cities will be big drivers because they have to be. Infrastructure is a key because it takes so long to decide/plan/fund/execute.

VT: And specifically what can they do now?

GL: See the light, join the green growth transformation and adapt – it’s not rocket science

VT: Again and again the opportunities for tourism leading the world to a green economy have been laid out. Who do you see as engaged leaders in this field – how are they benefitting now?

GL: I am less concerned about leaders and leadership than about sharing a common understanding and acting smartly. We pay too much attention to the leadership cult and all the trappings that go with it. It’s the commitment to implement and to be flexible to new needs that will make this happen. It’s also about really caring about what works and not which bureaucracy or Brand is working on it. It needs creativity and innovation. And it has to fully engage all stakeholders, including the base of the pyramid. It can’t be idealistic but has to be grounded in good practice, innovation and smart finance.

VT: You were the first to outline the quadruple bottom line benefits from sustainable tourism development – how many bottom lines do you see now?

GL: Well I still see four – but I decided to phrase them differently.  John Elkington in 1998 actually created the triple bottom line – economic, social and environmental balance – then in 2012 in the book Green Growth and Travelism: Letters from leaders that I co-edited with colleagues from Australia. UK and South Africa I argued that Climate which was not a discrete subset of any of the others and is so pervasive merited its own identity. The fact is that quadruple is a complex addition to the already difficult to grasp Triple Bottom Line concept, so I’m now calling it Triple Bottom Line + to get people to see the additional overriding dimension of climate response. And that’s detailed in a new book this spring Green Growth and Travelism: Concepts, Policies and Practices for Sustainable Tourism

VT: Who, specifically, gets to benefit from sustainable tourism development?

GL: Everyone if it’s done smartly and fairly, putting green on the same page as growth, measuring impacts as well as benefits, identifying main directions for essential change and then fixing them with inclusionary processes and baskets of market and regulatory measures, public and private funding.

No one if we don’t do it that way – it’s a value chain and you can’t hide from the fact that any trip requires thousands of inputs to make it work. If some parts fail we all sink.

VT: You have been engaged in the green agenda for at least 23 years now. In what way has your vision changed? Are both the opportunities and the challenges more dramatic?

GL: I’ve become older and I hope wiser. The issues have become clearer and the big choices simpler (we change or be changed) even as the world we live in is increasingly complex. Innovation and Technology will be the great saviors. Remember the airplane started in a bike shop.  I am more committed because I believe the issue of green growth is so clearly right.  And as Churchill said you might as well be an optimist – because there’s no point in being anything else.

VT: Simply, in your view, what must we do now?

GL: Adopt Green Growth as a force for good and factor it into every policy and program of the Travelism sector. Do it progressively but do it fast and start now. Above all focus on education as well as policy and practice. The next generation will be better equipped to do the heavy lifting as Climate Change intensifies.

Incidentally I am delighted that the businesses I am involved in, that pursue this approach – greenearth.travel and ICTP – will now link with you at Totem Tourism to spread the message.     

Thank you

Latest Sustainable Tourism Report gets Rave Reviews, GET FREE EXECUTIVE SUMMARY AND REVIEW OFFER HERE