Making the World Heritage List from
UNESCO, the United Nations’ educational, scientific, and cultural organization,
is a kind of gold seal of approval in the tourism world. The list, which began
in 1978, has more than 1,150 sites nominated by their host nations, and
includes tourist destinations such as the Great Wall of China, the Great
Barrier Reef in Australia, and the Central Amazon Conservation Complex in
Brazil.
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It also features some of the world’s
most-famous and most-visited
glaciers, including those in Yosemite and
Yellowstone national parks in the US. But according to a report released by the
agency in November, one-third of them are expected to disappear by 2050 because
of climate change.
The glaciers that are likely to disappear
include the last remaining ones in Africa, in Kilimanjaro National Park and on
Mount Kenya; those on the Pyrenees’ Mont Perdu, which spans the borders of
France and Spain; and in Italy’s Dolomites.
The report posed a challenge to the travel
industry, which is a large contributor to global carbon emissions, with a
footprint estimated between 8 percent and 11 percent of total greenhouse gases,
according to the World Travel & Tourism Council, or WTTC. Aviation
represents around 17 percent of total travel carbon emissions.
“The key message is that ultimately for the travel industry there is no vaccine for climate change. We must take urgent action to rapidly decarbonize.”
The report was a stark reminder of the
critical role the travel industry plays in preserving sensitive sites and
reducing carbon emissions, said James Thornton, the CEO of Intrepid Travel, a
travel company that specializes in sustainable travel and that organizes
journeys to many of the glaciers named in the report.
“It’s very much a wake-up call,” he said.
“The key message is that ultimately for the travel industry there is no vaccine
for climate change. We must take urgent action to rapidly decarbonize.”
Melting heritageFifty of
UNESCO’s World Heritage sites are
home to glaciers, and 18,600 glaciers have been identified at those sites.
One-third of the glaciers in these sites are “condemned to disappear by 2050”,
according to the report.
“These are projections,” said Tales
Carvalho Resende, a
UNESCO researcher from Brazil and one of the authors of the
report. “We hope we are wrong, of course, but these are projections based on
hard science.”
The glaciers will disappear regardless of
any “climate scenarios”, he said. But the remaining two-thirds of the glaciers
in the World Heritage sites could still be saved if global warming is limited
to 1.5 degrees Celsius, according to the report.
The glaciers on the list are losing 58
billion tonnes of ice a year, an amount equivalent to the combined annual water
use of France and Spain, according to
UNESCO. The melting is responsible for
nearly 5 percent of observed global sea-level rise, according to the study.
A traveler who flies once a year for a longer vacation would in theory have a smaller carbon footprint than a traveler who takes multiple, shorter trips on planes.
Enormous declines in the price of
renewables and a global political mobilization have led scientists to conclude
that warming this century will most likely fall between 2 or 3 degrees, far
below the catastrophic projections of 4 to 6 degrees that were once made. But
limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees is highly unlikely and even 1 or 2 more
degrees of warming will lead to more extreme weather, environmental disruption,
and suffering for millions of humans.
What can be done?Still, Resende said, the
UNESCO report
shows that the travel industry can play an enormous role in preserving World
Heritage sites and helping change traveler behavior.
He pointed to a 2019 ban forbidding
tourists from climbing Uluru, a giant monolith in Australia that is sacred to
the Anangu, an Aboriginal group that is the custodian of the rock. The ban,
which came after decades of campaigning by the Anangu people, has largely been
respected by tourists and has given park rangers time to maintain the flora and
fauna at Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, a World Heritage site.
Resende described it as an example of how
education and collaboration with local communities can compel tourists to
change their travel habits and learn how to better protect sensitive
destinations — lessons that can perhaps be applied to curbing
emission-producing behaviors.
Travel companies like Expedia and Kayak can
also encourage people to travel less frequently by advertising more weeklong
trips instead of three-day or weekend excursions, he said. A traveler who flies
once a year for a longer vacation would in theory have a smaller carbon
footprint than a traveler who takes multiple, shorter trips on planes, Resende
said.
The release of the report sparked concerns
that tourists would flock to the glaciers and see them before they disappear,
worsening overcrowded conditions at national parks and other delicate natural
areas.
“All national parks suffer from too many visitors and they’ve had to do drastic things over the last 10 years to deal with this issue.”
“All national parks suffer from too many
visitors and they’ve had to do drastic things over the last 10 years to deal
with this issue,” said Fred Bianchi, the director of Worcester Polytechnic
Institute’s Glacier National Park project center in Montana. The park was not
mentioned in the
UNESCO report, but scientists fear the park could be glacier
free by 2030.
The pandemic led many parks to put in a
reservation system to avoid heavy foot traffic. The
UNESCO report provides
another incentive for keeping that type of system in place, Bianchi said.
But more tourists should see the damage
caused by man-made climate change, said Luther Likes, a booking agent at Gray
Line Travel, which organizes trips to Yosemite National Park, where the two
glaciers, Lyell and Maclure, have been retreating for decades.
“It’s something to see it in pictures, but
to see it in person has a different impact,” Likes said. “It’s terrifying,
honestly.”
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