World Overtourism’s Big Footprint

By Alain Dumas, economist and Editor at the Gazette de la Mauricie

We often associate tourism with several virtues: leaving your comfort zone, discovering picturesque corners of the planet, immersing you in different cultures… But over the past 20 years, the world of tourism has undergone drastic change with the explosion of mass tourism. It’s called “world overtourism”.

That’s when a huge number of tourists go to places that end up becoming commodities in and of themselves. Does overtourism threaten natural and social ecosystems?

A Profile of World Tourism

World tourism has grown by 133% in the past 20 years. It now represents 10% of world GDP. The World Tourism Organization projects that the pre-pandemic record for tourist trips will be beaten in 2023, with 1.5 billion international voyages.

Taking an airplane still remains something that only a minority of people do. Indeed, 80% of the world’s population has never got on board an aircraft. And 11% of all Europeans and Americans take 66% of the world’s flights. Travel is an activity for the wealthiest: the richest 20% are responsible for 80% of all air transport. The richest 2% take 40% of the world’s air flights. That’s how the world’s wealthiest 1% can account for half of all air travel CO2 emissions.   

The Effects of Overtourism

Overtourism is bad news in terms of climate change and the ecology. Taking into account what travelers consume (transport, food, lodging and purchases), world tourism is at the root of 10% of humanity’s carbon footprint. Air transport alone creates 5.9% of all greenhouse gas emissions. Air travel is the most polluting kind of travel, as it emits six times more greenhouse gases per year than does automobile travel. A single return transatlantic trip spews out 1.6 metric tonnes of CO2 per person, which is enormous when you consider that an average Quebecer emits 9.6 tonnes of CO2 per year.

Mass tourism is characterized by high geographic concentration: only 10% of all tourist destinations are visited by 80% of all visitors. This overloads these most popular places and threatens not only their local cultural heritage, but also the survival of their human and natural ecosystems. Local residents are tossed out of their lodgings, which are turned into Airbnb apartments. This causes housing shortages and rent increases.

Concentrated tourism destroys the local economy, as neighborhood businesses (grocery stores, bakeries, etc.) are turned into bars, hotels and souvenir boutiques. Overtourism destroys the natural milieu when the construction of residences and tourist attractions leads to the paving over of fauna and the creation of artificial soils.

Solutions

If the current growth rate remains unchanged, world tourism will soon generate 5 to 6.5 billion tonnes of CO2 per year. This will compromise our ability to reach our greenhouse gas emission targets. What can be done to reverse this trend?

Individuals can make a difference. All you have to do to limit your carbon footprint is to travel less, and prioritize less polluting forms of transport when you do travel. Researchers have found that replacing 20 to 27 million business trips with virtual meetings could cut 1 to 3.8 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions over the next 25 years.

Airlines and travel agents have proposed planting trees to offset CO2 emissions. Greenpeace says this isn’t a real solution since it takes those young trees 25 to 30 years to mature to a point where they can process the CO2 produced today. It is sad to note that despite these CO2 compensation programs, the total number of trees on Earth is diminishing because of massive deforestation. The surface area available for the planting of new trees is shrinking all the time.

If voluntary gestures are important, they are insufficient to stop our climate crisis. Recently, to reduce the use of airplanes, various carbon taxes on air flights have been proposed. For example, the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) has suggested a progressive tax that could amount to $260 U.S. for a 20^th flight in one year.

Since 2020, France has imposed a tax on airplane tickets that varies from 1.50 to 18 Euros, according to destination and flight class. Holland enacted a similar tax in 2021, which amounts to anywhere from 7 to 24 Euros. The European Commission will soon put a tax on kerosene, the main component of jet fuel. This will cause ticket prices to increase depending on the length of a journey.