Destinations Known | The doom boom: ‘Last-chance tourism’ causes more harm than good, and why travellers should stay away
- Climate-minded travellers keen to experience a place before it is changed or gone forever are part of the problem, whether they acknowledge it or not
They are all recipients of “last-chance” tourists, travellers keen to experience a place before it disappears or is transformed beyond recognition, the victim of climate change or globalisation.
In 2016, the Journal of Sustainable Tourism published a study titled “Last chance tourism and the Great Barrier Reef”, which found that 69 per cent of visitors to the natural wonder felt a sense of urgency, to see it before the water gets too warm, the corals all bleach and the 2,300km-long ecosystem dies.
The issue with this is the role these tourists play in the reef’s ultimate extinction.
To reach their destination, the visitor will board a fossil-fuelled plane, and seeing as the reef is in a far-flung corner of the globe, that is in most cases going to be a large, long-haul fossil-fuelled plane. As they sit back to consume instantly forgettable food and films, our environmentally minded traveller is in many cases ignorant of the carbon impact they are making; after all, the airline industry hardly makes a song and dance of how polluting it is.
