Wildfires in Hawaii, Canada, Greece. Hurricanes in Florida and California. Heatwaves. Droughts. Floods. As the head of an international sustainable tourism organization, Jeremy Sampson can’t escape the unrelenting news.
Yet even as he grieves for those suffering from near-daily tragedies, Sampson’s regrets aren’t limited to the big headlines on his doomscroll. When he thinks of the costs of climate change, he also thinks about his kids.
And marshmallows.
As another summer of climate calamities unfolds, Sampson hopes more people draw a personal connection with the consequences of a warming planet. He figures it’s the only way to galvanize the level of coordination necessary to keep the travel industry growing — while helping to save the planet.
The Travel Foundation, where Sampson is CEO, published a report in March that laid out a plan for travel to meet United Nations’ goals of halving its global emissions by 2030 and achieving net zero by 2050 while still allowing the sector to grow.
While the report hardly needed more evidence to support its thesis, the intervening months have only bolstered the calls for action. Yet with travel surging back from the COVID-19 pandemic, is the industry ready to shut down the party and plan for the next threat?
Subscribe to our newsletter below
A report released this month from Anixe, a Polish travel tech company, captured that contrasting mood, alternating between celebrating “staggering” growth in global booking data while warning about the effects of “increasingly chaotic weather events” that included summer ice storms, heatwaves and wildfires in southern Europe.
“Unfortunately, new signs of trouble loom ahead for the travel industry as global climate change begins to show its teeth,” the report stated, later adding, “such travel disruptions are here to stay.”
The tone was echoed in a report from the World Economic Forum, which concluded that rising global temperatures are already affecting the tourism industry. It cited examples in July of Greece evacuating people from Rhodes because of wildfires and Athens closing the Acropolis because of excessive heat.
Those reports came too soon to include August’s chaos — the Hawaiian fires that killed more than a hundred people and ravaged the town of Lahaina; Hurricane Hilary, which prompted the U.S. National Hurricane Center to issue its first-ever tropical storm warning for parts of Southern California; or this week’s Hurricane Idalia, which made landfall in Florida early Wednesday as a Category 3 storm — an “unprecedented event,” according to the National Weather Service, which has never recorded a major hurricane passing through the bay abutting Florida’s Big Bend region.
Even for a population inured to news of weather disasters, the unusual nature of this summer’s events has “taken people by surprise,” Sampson said. He hopes in the long run that proves a good thing.
“In a way, I suppose if there's any silver lining to these horrible disasters it’s that every single time something like this happens, the climate crisis becomes sort of clearer,” Sampson said. “In some ways I believe that it helps our cause because the reality is some people need to feel the sort of impact tangibly on their life.”
For Sampson, that impact is felt in the time he spends with his family. They live in Spokane, Washington, where traditional summer camping has been curtailed by seasonal wildfires. While wildfires have always been an occasional threat in the American West, now they’re practically an annual rite, like the lilacs that bloom in spring.
If Sampson wants to take the family camping, they must go earlier in the season to avoid the near certainty of smoky conditions. And when they go, they know they won’t be able to have a campfire.
“It's a small thing in the grand scheme of things,” he said. “But from the time I was a child, the cool thing is you sit out at your campsite, and you roast marshmallows. And there is no roasting of marshmallows anymore because you can't have a fire all summer anywhere in the northwest. It kind of upsets me not to be able to do the thing with my kids that I used to love to do.”
Travel’s need for collaboration
Sampson knows nearly every traveler has a story of how they’ve had to adapt plans to a changing climate. Ski vacations canceled for lack of snow. Cruises rescheduled because of more active hurricane seasons. Walking tours of Rome curtailed by excessive heat.
While no one would equate such inconveniences or the loss of marshmallow roasting to killer storms and fires, Sampson understands that even small-scale but personal impacts can drive home the need for action more effectively than impersonal news from far-flung corners of the globe.
But is it enough to generate the level of collaboration the travel industry will need to achieve net zero by 2050?
Bernadett Papp, a senior researcher with the European Tourism Futures Institute and one of the authors of the Travel Foundation report, spoke in June at Phocuswright Europe 2023 in Barcelona of the common interests served through collective, short-term sacrifice.
“We need to join forces. We need to collaborate,” she urged the audience. “Hopefully then, the goal of net zero by 2050 will be in reach, and we as a sector can do our part.”
It won’t be easy. To get there, the report called for investments in decarbonization measures of several trillion dollars — no chump change, even as the report noted it amounted to no more than 2 to 3% of total tourism revenue over the period.
We see that both destinations and businesses, big and small, are trying to get to a more sustainable future. Often with baby steps, and not as fast as we maybe should, but these are steps nonetheless.
Ewout Versloot - Netherlands Board of Tourism & Conventions
The ask was even greater for the airline industry, which faces some of the biggest challenges to becoming carbon neutral.
The report calls for capping long-haul flights at 2019 levels until aviation can fully decarbonize. That’s because those flights — defined as round trips of 10,000 miles or more, about the distance from New York to Athens — made up just 2% of all trips in 2019 yet accounted for 19% of tourism’s total emissions. If left unchecked, the number of long-haul flights could quadruple by 2050 and account for 41% of tourism’s total emissions.
While those are big asks, the people behind the study concluded it was the only way to meet the climate goals and allow travel to grow — to the benefit of all stakeholders, Papp said.
“If there’s no destination or it’s not safe to travel to the destination, then there is no tourism. And if there’s no tourism, many destinations will have a very difficult time to drive their economies forward,” she said. “So I strongly believe it is in our common interest to protect destinations against the impact of climate change so that communities can thrive.”
Governments and businesses in the travel sector have been taking steps. Countries in Europe especially have been encouraging greater use of rail. The Netherlands announced a cap on capacity at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport for environmental reasons. France instituted a partial ban on short-haul flights where trains could make the same journey in two and a half hours or less. Airlines and others are investing in sustainable aviation fuel, while some governments have set mandates for its increased use.
“We see that both destinations and businesses, big and small, are trying to get to a more sustainable future. Often with baby steps, and not as fast as we maybe should, but these are steps nonetheless,” said Ewout Versloot, a strategist with the Netherlands Board of Tourism & Conventions. “These actions show other businesses and destinations that change is possible, that visitors are very much looking for sustainable options and that it might actually be a wise business decision to focus on sustainability.”
The dangers to travel from inaction
“Baby steps,” however, won’t get travel to carbon neutrality. And Versloot hopes the industry doesn’t sit back waiting for some technological breakthrough to solve the problem.
“Yes, innovation, like, for example, sustainable fuels for aircrafts, will and can help,” he said. “But at this moment, it is not enough to bring us to climate neutrality. We have no time to lose, so it is time to think of other solutions as well.”
One example, he said, lies with long-running discussions in the European Union to adopt the Single European Sky initiative. The plan, also backed by airlines, aims to increase the efficiency of air traffic management and air navigation services by reducing the fragmentation of European airspace. Instead of planes having to navigate a patchwork of 27 different national air traffic control jurisdictions, they would pass through restructured blocks of airspace.
“Implementing this might save us 10% in CO2 emissions, simply by flying more efficient routes,” Versloot said.
Yet bringing together the people who can make that happen – or produce other meaningful change – remains a challenge.
Marco Lucero, founder of the Chile-based tourism advocacy organization Cuidadores de Destinos, or Destination Caretakers, finds some hope in the precedent of cooperation within the travel industry that came about during COVID-19. From that emerged the United Nations-backed Glasgow Declaration for Climate Action in Tourism, which ultimately led to the publication of the Travel Foundation report.
People are always going to travel, but it's going to have to change. And so it's up to the industry, I think, to either facilitate that change or bury its head in the sand and let it happen.
Jeremy Sampson - The Travel Foundation
“During the pandemic, you could see some collaboration that you couldn't see before. And I mean globally, not just regionally,” Lucero said. “You could see people from the entire world getting together, reflecting, thinking and giving space to think about the future and where we are going. That's something that I didn't see before in the history of the industry.
“But we definitely need more,” he added. “The Glasgow Declaration was a good first step, and now we need to go deeper.”
The alternatives to coordinated action by the industry are things Sampson would rather not ponder. As conditions worsen, governments may feel compelled to impose restrictions that impede travel’s growth. Or the travel that remains possible could becomes so expensive only the world’s wealthiest people can afford it. Or destinations where people depend on travel for their livelihoods get left behind.
“We can't all abandon the Caribbean,” Sampson said, citing one example. “But if people aren't able to fly to the Caribbean anymore because it's prohibitive from an emissions perspective or prohibitive from a cost perspective … what does the Caribbean do?”
Climate equity in travel is just one reason why he believes it’s better for the industry to be proactive rather than wait and respond to market or government forces.
“I think that needs to be thought through,” he said, “so that business is not lost, so that ultimately the communities and people who were not responsible for the climate crisis don't suffer disproportionately from this problem, which I think is where we're headed if this isn’t coordinated.”
The Travel Foundation and its allies charted a course that would allow the industry to continue growing even as it worked to meet global climate goals. This summer has only reinforced the need for collective action, yet Sampson can only hope the message takes. Otherwise, the joys of travel — as glorious as a sunset on a Greek island or as simple as a roasted marshmallow – may be lost for many.
“People are always going to travel, but it's going to have to change,” Sampson said. “And so it's up to the industry, I think, to either facilitate that change or bury its head in the sand and let it happen.”