There can be little doubt that the tourism, aviation and transport sectors are particularly at risk both from direct effects – such as sea-level rise, changing ecosystems, species extinctions, extreme weather events, etc. in the case of tourism – as well as from attempts to mitigate climate change by cutting carbon emissions. Regulated reductions in travel-related carbon emissions, carbon taxes and rising fuel prices precipitated by the looming oil crisis will all conspire to seriously crimp long-haul tourism (bad news for ecotourism) and air travel, assuming that substantive goals are agreed on at Copenhagen. Even if the world’s politicians lack the courage to agree to substantive emissions reductions, as might be the case, “peak oil” will eventually force what we fail to do voluntarily.

KPMG's Risk Preparedness Framework (Source: KMPG IT Advisory: Find your shade of green. Copyright KPMG 2009 All rights reserved)

KPMG’s Risk Preparedness Framework, reproduced here (click to view full size), shows the transport, tourism and aviation sectors in the “danger zone” where risk as a result of climate change is perceived to be greater than preparedness. What might “preparedness” mean? Prepared to mitigate (or prevent) climate change as the designers of Copenhagen envisage? Or prepared to adapt to the inevitability of climate change?

Should Copenhagen fail we all enter a brave new world of adaptation to climate change, where we place our trust in geo-engineering technologies and where, without massive transfers of technology and resources to developing nations, they will be cut loose and left at the mercy of the elements. Failure at Copenhagen will amount to a vote for vested interests – and some of those interests may include the airline industry, economies dependent on mass and growing tourism, etc.

The language in the World Tourism Organization’s (WTO) Davos to Bali declaration suggests that adaptation is the preferred and expected course for most of its members. Developing countries, it seems, have resigned themselves to adapting to the “inevitability” of climate change. Consider the Indian delegation’s statement at the Ministers’ Summit on Tourism and Climate Change in London in 2007:

…we must significantly shore up our abilities to cope with and adapt to climate change. To be able to do so, we need development, which is also the best form of adaptation. … we need to …. see what can be done to adapt to the inevitability of further global warming.

One wonders whether “development” will be enough when a 100 million Bangladeshi climate refugees stream into India as they flee their flooded delta?

Brazil’s delegation also weighed in with a plea for assistance with adaptation:

Assist developing countries where the tourism sector is particularly vulnerable to the adverse effect of climate change, in order to allow them to meet the related costs of adaptation.

Never mind that the continuing assault on its Amazon rainforests contributes massively to climate change, or that the country is banking on exploiting recent deep-sea oil finds.

Australia, a developed country which has distinguished itself by failing to ratify the Kyoto Protocol along with the USA, and probably informed by its economic vulnerability as a long-haul tourism destination dependent on air travel, put a different spin on it:

The tourism sector … should not be disadvantaged through the imposition of a disproportionate burden either on tourism as a whole or on vital components such as aviation.

The tourism-sector-as-victim argument.

If all else fails however, reach for the jobs/poverty alleviation/economic growth arguments – as the WTO Secretary-General did in Bali. The message seems to be: yes climate change is potentially catastrophic, but don’t touch tourism (and by extension, air travel) as it creates jobs, grows economies and benefits the poor in far-off destinations (Australia excluded).

I have also wrestled with the dilemma of the climate implications of long-haul travel versus the dependence of biodiversity conservation on ecotourism, especially in Africa. This is however not an environmental-socio-economic trade-off, but an attempt to weigh ecological alternatives. One could, however, argue that biodiversity is doomed by climate change over the long-term, notwithstanding short-term attempts to mitigate biodiversity destruction… And when biodiversity goes, species, livelihoods and the ecosystem services that sustain all life will follow in short order.

Another indication that the tourism industry has not quite come to terms with what sustainability might entail is a reference to the need for “tourism to grow in a sustainable manner” in the Davos Declaration after the Second International Conference on Climate Change and Tourism at Davos in 2007. Besides the incongruous proximity of the words “grow” and “sustainable” in that phrase, the methods of achieving this through mitigating emissions, adapting to climate and employing technology to improve energy efficiency are insufficient, although laudable. True (strong) ecological sustainability means that material and energy throughputs must be limited to what the ecosphere can sustainably supply (resources) and absorb (waste, emissions). Best effort mitigation and minimisation are not going to cut it.

Take as an example the need to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 60%-80% of current levels by 2050 in order to limit the average global temperature increase to 2^oC. Suppose air travel volumes and aircraft-miles were clamped at current levels and that all airline fleets were replaced with Boeing Dreamliners tomorrow. Even in this unlikely, zero-growth scenario aviation emissions would be reduced by only 20%, which means that tourism would not be contributing anywhere near its share of reductions. Outside of hoping for a technological silver bullet to come to the rescue, the implications for tourism are pretty stark and understandably nobody wants to really deal with them.

So, no – the tourism industry is not ready for climate risk.

Prof Dave Richardson of the Centre of Excellence for Invasion Biology at Stellenbosch University is the lead author of a ground-breaking paper that describes a tool to help policy-makers and scientists employ “managed relocation” to move species into “more accommodating habitat” where they are currently absent.

“We hope that the tool will help to reduce the polarity that has emerged in the debate on whether managed relocation should be added to the conservationist’s toolbox,” says Prof Richardson.

“Scientists are, for the first time, objectively evaluating ways to help species cope with rapidly changing climate and other environmental threats by implementing strategies that were considered too radical for serious consideration as recently as five or ten years ago,” explains Prof Richardson, one of the world’s leading minds on matters pertaining to invasive species.

“Our decision-making tool is ground-breaking because managed relocation has traditionally been categorically eschewed by scientists for fear that relocated species would harm receiving habitats by reproducing wildly out of control, causing extinctions of local species,” says Prof Richardson, who cites the way in which invasive alien trees have reduced water production from mountain catchments in the Western Cape as an example of the damage that translocation can do.

Now that is radical. It seems climate change is so rapid, that a more than 2 degrees C average global temperature increase this century is inevitable, that we are going to intervene radically in ecosystem functioning in order to help our fellow species survive. I wonder where we can relocate the polar bears to?

Ralph Pina is an ecoAfrica.com founder

So it is with anger that I witnessed the G8 powers’ leaders back away from substantive and immediate reductions in their countries’ emissions and vaguely promise halving of emissions by 2050. Halving with reference to what baseline? 2008 and not 1990? What about intermediate emissions targets? What happened to some of these countries’ undertakings under Kyoto? A spectacle of spinelessness.

Not that China and my own South Africa can simply claim the moral high ground and point accusing fingers at the rich nations. South Africa is one of the most carbon-intensive economies in the world, and China’s aggregate emissions are already approaching those of the USA, albeit on a much lower per capita basis.

But others are able to express outrage and apply pressure better than me. What interests me is the static nature of protected areas (PAs) like the Kruger Park in the face of changing climatic conditions. Protected areas are human creations and like human settlements their locations have been determined by our experience of relatively stable and benign climate conditions over the last millennia, but mainly the last 500 or so years.

In fact many PAs are what and where they are because the areas were less attractive and habitable for humans, more specifically colonial humans. They are opportunistic creations. The lowveld plain east of the escarpment where Kruger is located was a fever-ridden area for the boers at the time (the late 19th century) that the reserves that would make up the park were proclaimed. Modern-day Kruger is a north-south oriented, 300km-by-60 km sliver of land (see our Kruger Park layer in Google Earth for a spatial exploration) jammed between the escarpment and Mozambique. Although relatively large, its ecosystems and wildlife populations are artificially managed – man-made waterholes and fences determine the distribution and movements of wildlife.

Species have always migrated as climate has changed over the millennia, but neither national park boundaries nor national borders will be able to move. They are locked in. That is one problem; another is that climate may be changing faster than species can adapt. There is a further problem too: patterns of human settlement and land transformation have limited the options for natural systems. It is only fairly recently that conservation priorities have shifted away from conserving species and landscapes to protecting the integrity of ecosystem processes that ensure that Nature has options so that species can adapt. Re-establishing migration routes and ecosystem functioning are some of the rationales behind transfrontier parks such as the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park that comprises Kruger, Limpopo and Gonarezhou national parks.

It is predicted that as temperatures rise and rainfall decreases in the Cape, so fynbos plant species will migrate south-eastwards – that is if there are corridors for them to migrate along. Let us for a moment imagine a similar scenario for the vegetation in Kruger, where it migrates eastwards into Mozambique, into its mirror-image park, Limpopo National Park, and beyond. When the fences are eventually down, the herbivores will follow their food and the predators will as well, but Kruger’s tourism infrastructure and its restcamps won’t be able to cross the border. In fact it is highly unlikely that South Africa’s tourism and parks authorities would be pleased about ceding their tourism income to Mozambique. Rather, artificial interventions to retain species within Kruger might be intensified. [Note: this is not a scientific, real scenario, but a thought experiment]

We have fixed cities, parks and borders in space, but the elements and conditions that support life – biodiversity, ecosystems, biomes, climate – are not fixed in space, never have been and never will be.

Ralph Pina is ecoAfrica‘s chairman