Climate change: How harmful is tourism for the environment?

By JONAS MARTINY

NEW YORK: When it’s high season on the Spanish tourist island of Mallorca, it’s not unusual to have up to 10 aircraft on the horizon at the same time.

Exactly 2,014 arrivals and departures were scheduled at Palma’s airport last weekend — an average of one takeoff or landing every 90 seconds.

During the summer months, this is the normal volume of air traffic for Mallorca. And this has vast consequences for the environment.

“There are few places in the world that contribute as much to global warming as Mallorca,” says Jaume Adrover, a spokesperson for the Mallorca-based environmental group Terraferida. “And this is due to only one activity: tourism.”

Over the past 20 years, he says, the island’s airport has registered 1.4 million aircraft passages with 195 million passengers — the majority of them vacationers from places like Germany and Great Britain. The consequences of tourism to the island for the climate are enormous, Adrover says. In the course of the past two decades, 100 trillion tons of CO2 alone have been emitted by air traffic on Mallorca alone. The Balearic island is just one example. According to experts, tourism causes about 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

“At first glance, that may not sound like much,” says Wolfgang Strasdas, head of research at the Center for Sustainable Tourism at Eberswalde University of Applied Sciences in Germany. But, he adds, there aren’t many other industries that account for a larger share.

And every single sector must make its contribution toward reduction, he explains. “Tourism is an important industry when we talk about reducing greenhouse gas emissions.” First and foremost, it’s about mobility, as most emissions are caused by travel to and from the destination. “Of course, what I eat on vacation also plays a role,” Strasdas points out. Tourists eat a much more “emissions-intensive” diet, such as eating more meat than usual and due to the presence of food buffets at hotels and restaurants.

According to the German Hotel and Restaurant Association, about 17 to 50 kilograms (37 to 110 pounds) of CO2 are produced per guest and overnight stay, depending on the star category of the hotel. And water consumption per person in five-star hotels amounts to a staggering 522 litres a day. The cruise industry also has a lot of catching up to do. “Although individual pilot projects give cause for hope, the industry as a whole is not yet on course to meet the targets of the Paris Agreement in time,” says German environmental group NABU, for example.

The tourism industry seems to have realised that the days of carefree travel are over. “We can’t go on like this,” said Norbert Fiebig, president of the German Travel Association DRV.

Air travel and the emissions caused by it are the industry’s “Achilles’ heel,” he adds. The goal must be CO2-neutral mobility. The World Tourism Organization also places the onus on the industry itself.

CO2 emissions from tourism rose 60% between 2005 and 2016, according to the Glasgow Declaration, which was presented at the UN climate change conference in 2021 and which 600 representatives of the tourism industry have now signed. They all pledged to become climate-neutral by 2050 at the latest.

But that will not be easy. The aviation industry, of all sectors, is unlikely to see any fundamental change, at least in the short term.

“Progress in this area has been so slow that serious doubts are warranted about the aviation industry’s ability to achieve its zero-emissions target by mid-century,” the think tank Transport & Environment stated.