IN FOCUS: TOWARDS A CARBON-NEUTRAL DESTINATION TASMANIA

Inala Nature Tours – Photo Credit: Tourism Australia.

Over the past three years, we’ve been working with experts to begin to gain the knowledge and insights we need to develop a long-term plan for Tasmania to become a global leader in the transition to climateconscious travel.

Prior to Covid, we could all see the emerging trends with giant travel companies like Marriott and Airbnb, along with many of the world’s major airlines, including Qantas, announcing significant emission reduction targets. We also saw the ‘Flyskam’ movement in Europe demonstrate the power of the activist consumer in rapidly shifting travel behaviour on a large scale. Through Covid, these trends have only exacerbated with more consumers making purchase decisions based on sustainability and regenerative practices. Tourism Tasmania’s consumer research adviser, Kantar, presented compelling insights to the Tasmanian Tourism

Conference in August, illustrating the forecast growth of brands grounded in true sustainability outcomes. The ‘trend’ is now the way of doing business. With our renewable energy resources and clean, green brand, we have always thought Tasmania might have an opportunity to position itself as a leader in the global transition towards more carbon-responsible travel. But we needed to understand exactly what it means to be a global leader in this space, and what might be expected from our tourism operators, visitors, and governments in a more sustainable future. To begin this process, back in 2019 the Tasmanian Government asked Point Advisory to advise us on what it would take for Tasmania to be a carbonneutral destination. Point Advisory is a specialist carbon advisory firm based out of Melbourne that the Tasmanian Government engages to calculate the state’s carbon emissions. Point Advisory’s advice was that while it was certainly possible for Tasmania to offset the carbon emissions of all visitors to the state, there was not yet any definitive global standards on what it means to be a carbon-neutral visitor destination. At the time there were no other significant visitor destinations in the world who had achieved this aspiration, nor were there any set ‘rules’ to follow on carbonneutral tourism. As a visitor destination, Tasmania was not just aspiring to be a global leader in this space but would likely need to be the pioneer. With this reality check, TICT got a grant from the Tasmanian Government to commission Point Advisory to approximate the emissions footprint of visitation to the state. How much carbon does Tasmanian tourism generate? How big is the problem we want to fix? What they found was that in 2019, before Covid, tourism to Tasmania generated between 500,000 and 1 million tons of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The big variation in these numbers depends on factors such as: • Do we include all visitors to the island, or just holidaymaking tourists? • Do we include all the emissions generated through air and sea travel to and from the island? • Or do we follow the guidelines in the Kyoto

Protocol around travel emissions, that says you only need to account for half the air and sea travel emissions of travelling to and from a destination, with the other half ‘remaining’ with the place from which our visitors travelled? Point Advisory told us that if we simply choose to offset these emissions, which means purchasing certified carbon credits for investments in reforestation or renewable energy projects throughout the world that are supposed to take equivalent amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere, the cost could be anywhere between $10 and $50 million a year. As much as we all want to do the right thing in this space, I don’t know many Tasmanian Governments or tourism operators who will be willing to write a cheque out every year for tens of millions of dollars to purchase solar panels in India, or support reforestation projects in Africa, just so we can then claim that Tasmania is a carbon-neutral destination. So, we learned we need to look at what we can do in Tasmania to firstly reduce our emissions as an industry, and then establish carbon projects within the state, so those tourism operators and visitors who do wish to make their tourism activity carbonneutral can invest in local projects, keeping their money in Tasmania and supporting conservation projects, here, at home. Over the past few months, we’ve run a fantastic project with north-west based carbon accountants, Ellis Richmond. Carbon accounting is the process of taking all your day-to-day accounts – analysing everything you buy and sell – and then applying emissions standards against all your purchases and activities to calculate an emission footprint. Thanks to a grant from the Department of State Growth, Ellis Richmond has been funded to undertake carbon accounting with 30 Tasmanian tourism operators who are highly representative of the broader tourism industry, including large and small tour operators, hotels and B&Bs, wineries, restaurants, attractions, and marketing bodies. The purpose of this project is to get a clear sense of the emissions footprint of a representative group of businesses across the visitor economy to start identifying

Fork n Farm Homestead – Photo Credit: Tourism Australia.

the best opportunities to reduce emissions across the industry. In most parts of the world, the most effective way to reduce emissions would be to use less energy, but in Tasmania our renewable baseload energy means most of our tourism businesses are already running clean and green. Converting vehicles from diesel to electric is highly expensive and beyond the capacity of most small businesses right now. What the Ellis Richmond project has shown us is that if we want to reduce emissions across the Tasmanian visitor economy, we need to be looking at our suppliers who generate what is known as ‘Scope 3’ emissions. These are the businesses from whom we purchase our food supplies and other produce, the laundries who wash the sheets and towels for our accommodation operators, the companies who supply those plastic-heavy shampoo bottles, stationery and other goodies, and the building materials we use in our refurbishments. This is where many of the emissions sit, and where we could make a real difference in reducing Towour overall footprint. The thing is, as an industry, we all use the same suppliers. The Ellis Richmond team found that 20 businesses are responsible for 85% of the Scope 3 emissions among the 30 tourism businesses they worked with. Some of these are the major national retailers, of course, but others are Tasmanian companies we all know well, and purchase from on a regular basis. So, we have learned that if we want to make some serious inroads in reducing the overall emission footprint of Tasmanian tourism, we have a relatively short list of suppliers we need to start working with and supporting to reduce their emissions, in order to reduce the footprint of a large number of tourism operators. To put this in perspective, if those 20 suppliers reduced their carbon emissions by just 10%, it would be the equivalent of removing the emissions from the atmosphere of every diesel vehicle used in the Tasmanian tourism industry. But we’ll never remove every emission in the sector, so we will still need to look at offsetting opportunities to achieve Net Zero tourism.

Pearshape, King Island – Photo Credit: Adam Gibson.

Lovers Falls, Pieman River – Photo Credit: Rob Mulally. How do we create a market whereby tourism operators and visitors who want to offset their tourism activity within their state, can affordably invest in certified carbon credit projects within Tasmania? Imagine visitors to the state offsetting their stay by funding the reforestation of a logging coup in the Styx Valley, or establishing kelp plantations on the east coast, or funding biochar plants that monetise weeds (yes, that is a real thing – Google it!).

Tasmania has an opportunity to be a global leader in the transition to carbonneutral travel, but it’s not going to just happen. We are beginning to understand the most effective ways to reduce our industry’s carbon footprint, and the investments we’ll need to make as an industry, and as individual operators, in transitioning to a low carbon future.

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