Greetings, welcome and salutations to all the readers,
travellers and curious minds!
Now, before delving into some of the global environmental
issues associated with tourism, I thought I’d outline a couple of important
concepts that will come in useful when thinking about tourism’s impact on the
environment.
Planetary Boundaries
The first is the recently updated framework of planetary boundaries, which essentially lays out a “safe operating space” for
societal development. The framework proposes boundaries for the anthropogenic
influence on nine key biophysical processes regulating the Earth’s systems
stability (Figure 1). Figure 1 illustrates the current state of affairs; past the “danger” end of the yellow zone of increasing risk,
there is a vastly increased chance of change to the Earth
system's functioning. Already the anthropogenic alteration of 4 of these Earth system processes exceeds the
proposed planetary boundary. Evidence of this increasing transgression of
boundaries comes, for example, from the rising intensity and occurrence of numerous extreme weather events under the influence of increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations.
Accounting for 5% of all global greenhouse gas emissions (this being a conservative estimation!),
the tourism industry is not guilt-free.
Figure 1. The current levels of the control
variables for 7 planetary boundaries. The planetary boundary falls at the end of the green zone. Grey is used where boundaries cannot yet be calculated for a process. Source.
The authors argue that if anthropogenic activities continue
to shift the Earth's system out of Holocene conditions, this will likely
culminate in an Earth-state that is much less catering to human societies.
These boundaries and have been criticised for their subjectivity (although this is controversial and highly debated!), but the authors argue that controlling our activities so we stay within them would greatly reduce the
risk of driving the Earth system into this dreaded unhospitable state. Through
this blog, I would argue that tourism and travel directly contribute to this
path on a global scale through, for example, greenhouse gas emissions from air
travel. As such, application of these planetary boundaries is very relevant to
management of the sector.
Furthermore, five of these processes,
including freshwater use and biosphere integrity, have strong regional and
local operating scales and thresholds, but aggregate at the global scale and feedback to the system processes with planetary-scale thresholds, such as
climate change.
Figure 2. Framework illustrating the feedbacks between the local/regional impacts and global feedbacks, under the planetary scale framework. Figure displays the 3 zones and likely position of the threshold. Source.
This is especially important when considering the
environmental impacts of tourism, as many of the industry’s impacts are
exhibited in highly localised settings (i.e. Process Y), yet aggregate together
or feedback to global-scale processes (i.e. Process X) to create global
environmental problems. For example, localised damage to coral reefs at tourism-intense sites adds to the damage from other anthropogenic activities
at many sites worldwide, and reduces resilience to global-scale processes including coral bleaching and climate change.
Ecosystem Services
The nine biophysical processes in the planetary boundaries
framework maintain the Earth system’s stability through regulating biochemical flows (e.g. the biological carbon sinks) and by enhancing ecosystem resilience. Ecosystem
resilience is linked to the second, distinct yet related, concept I wish to outline in this
post – ecosystem services. Definitions of ecosystem services focus on the value
and uses that ecosystems provide to humans, for example: “the benefits provided by the ecosystems that contribute to making human life both possible and worth living”.
In light of these human uses, the importance of ecosystem
services to the tourism industry is vast. In particular, the category of ‘cultural
services’ (Table 1), defined as “nonmaterial benefits people obtain from ecosystems through…recreation, and aesthetic experiences” is important in attracting tourists to a site in the
first place. For example, the majority of tourism to the Great Barrier Reef in
Australia is brought in by the attraction of the coral reefs ecosystems.
Figure 3. Categorised ecosystem services, and their interactions with human well being, and indirect or direct causes of change in ecosystem services. Interactions can occur at multiple spatial scales and can cross spatial scales. For example, a national demand for firewood can cause a regional loss of woodland, thus affecting the dynamics of a local river system. Interactions can also occur at multiple time-scales. Source.
As such, ecosystems have brought economic prosperity to humans.
For the tourism industry, ecosystems in the forms of coral reefs, rainforests,
alpine slopes and woodlands (to name a few!) have been critical in attracting
tourists and generating income for areas, thus contributing to human
well-being. Yet economic prosperity has led to overuse of provisioning services,
resulting in over ½ of the world’s ecosystems having been lost in the past
century, and the depletion of biodiversity having increased to an unprecedented
rate (UN General Assembly, 2010).
The overall diversity of services provided by degraded ecosystems is less,
reducing the resilience of the ecosystem, and threatening the provisioning of
ES in the long run.
This blog will touch upon some of the ways tourism has contributed to decline
of ecosystem services, through for example, the introduction of non-native
invasive species and damage to coral reefs.
Last words...
I hope that this introductory post has provided you with an
idea of the tourism-related environmental issues I shall be discussing in this
blog, and some of the frameworks through which we can view and analyse them.
Tune in next week for an overview of where research into tourism’s impact on
the environment all began. ‘Till next time folks!
