Rethinking Tourism in an Overcrowded World
By Nandita Bajaj
On a summer morning in 2017, as my husband and I were planning our next summer getaway, we learned of a new study called “The climate mitigation gap: Education and government recommendations miss the most effective individual actions”. It highlighted the most impactful actions individuals could take to reduce their carbon impact. Out of the top four high-impact actions that were listed, we were relieved to see that we were intuitively practicing three of them — we have a small family (no children), we don’t own a car, and we don’t consume animal-derived products. However, the stat that surprised us the most was the enormous carbon footprint associated with flying — avoiding one round-trip transatlantic flight is equivalent to avoiding all animal-based products for two years or recycling for eight years. We were living so frugally in many other ways and saw vacationing as our main indulgence, only to realize that the couple of round trip flights we would take over our summer holidays would blow most of the carbon savings we had accrued through our other high-impact actions all year. We started to dig deeper into the impacts of flying, and the impacts of tourism more generally. The results were alarming.
We learned that over the past 50 years the world population has doubled from four billion to approximately eight billion and global tourism has increased by a factor of eight. During that same time, climate change has emerged as an existential threat (especially for the world’s most vulnerable populations) and the global non-human vertebrate population has declined by 68%. Roughly 83 million people are added to the planet each year, and approximately 150 million people enter into the global middle class annually. It is no surprise, then, that the global tourism industry has grown from 166 million in 1970 to almost 1.4 billion today, and according to the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), transport-related emissions from tourism represent 5% of all man-made emissions and 22% of all transport emissions.
But greenhouse gas emissions are not the only drawback of this surge. The UNWTO defines overtourism as “the impact of tourism on a destination, or parts thereof, that excessively influences perceived quality of life of citizens and/or quality of visitors’ experiences in a negative way”. As such, overtourism often comes at the expense of local environments and communities, including wild animal and plant species. When not examined thoughtfully, tourism is almost always linked, in some way, to the oppression of communities, animals, and/or the environment of “destinations”.
Concerned by our own complicity in this issue, my husband and I started exploring our relationship to travel more deeply. A number of different initiatives were emerging around that time, including the No Fly Climate Sci initiative in academia. Given that we had done more than our fair share of traveling over a decade, we felt that the right step for us to minimize our impact was to give up all non-essential flying. We started to look for other creative and meaningful ways of engaging with travel, such as closer-to-home getaways via lower-carbon modes of transportation. While it was challenging at first to not rely on crowd-sourced destination recommendations, it became easier and more enjoyable to seek out our own local adventures that were not mired in overtourism.
Tourism, if premised solely upon self-gratification and unsustainable economic growth at the expense of the rights and interests of local communities, can become deeply harmful. However, when exercised thoughtfully, travel can also be a form of enrichment, growth, and cross-cultural understanding. Sustainable travel initiatives like RISE Travel Institute can help us reexamine our relationship to tourism and learn about responsible, impactful, sustainable and ethical ways of traveling that can be a force for positive transformation for both travelers and local communities.
Finally, and given that it is World Population Day, I would be remiss if I did not mention that overtourism is a symptom of our rapidly growing human footprint. Our human footprint is a function of both our per capita consumption (which is disportionately high in the U.S. and Canada compared to countries in the developing world) and the exponential growth in our numbers. This is pushing us deeper into ecological overshoot, a state in which our human demand has far exceeded the regenerative capacity of our biosphere. According to the study I mentioned earlier, having one fewer child in an industrialized country like the U.S. or Canada is 30–50 times more effective at reducing an individual’s footprint than the other actions they can take. Choosing to have small families is therefore one of the most significant actions we can take to help create a world where our human footprint is in balance with life on Earth, and all species can thrive.
About the author: Nandita is the Executive Director of World Population Balance (WPB) brings over 15 years of experience in engineering, education, environmental and animal advocacy, and non-profit management to WPB. A Humane Educator and a passionate advocate for planetary health, Nandita brings an intersectional lens to the overpopulation issue and its implications on human rights, animal protection, and environmental preservation. She has a BEng (Aerospace Engineering) from Ryerson University and a BEd from University of Toronto. Nandita is completing her MEd in Humane Education from Antioch University. Nandita will be joining Antioch University in 2022 as an instructor where she will teach a graduate course on ‘Pronatalism and Overpopulation’. She also serves as a Board member for the Canadian Society for Humane Science. Originally from Chandigarh, India, Nandita lives in Toronto, Canada with her husband Mike and her dog Sophie. Nandita and Mike are passionate advocates of childfree and minimalist living.
