POLICY WATCH: TASMANIA’S OPPORTUNITY TO CHAMPION A CARBON NEUTRAL TOURISM INDUSTRY
H
ere is an inconvenient truth: civil aviation is responsible for 2 per cent of global carbon emissions. In the scheme of things, this might sound like a relatively small number until you consider that only 5 per cent of the world’s population can afford to travel by air. A return flight between London and Sydney can emit greenhouse gases equivalent to 3 tonnes of CO2 per person. This is more than most human’s entire carbon footprint for a year. Before COVID, the tourism industry across the globe was confronting our own inherent conflict between our love of earth and the hard reality that we do constitute one of the most carbon-dense forms of human activity. Values and expectations on our industry have been changing rapidly with the spotlight on what different sectors of the travel industry and individual destinations are doing to mitigate their contribution to the global climate emergency. This is not just a question of science and conservation but also increasingly a commercial one. The travelling public are, more than ever, making consumer decisions based on their aspirations for responsible travel.
10
Across the globe we are seeing examples of where carbon-responsible travel is being driven by consumers. In 2018, the ‘Flygskam’ movement (literally meaning ‘flight shame’), was powered by social media and Greta Thunberg and over the course of a few months, managed to slow, and then reverse into decline, Sweden’s previous exponential annual growth in air travel. Across Europe, demand for sleeper trains is growing for the first time in decades, with the EU scrambling to re-establish overnight commuter services between major population centres long thought to have been consigned to history, and the modernity of budget air travel. Airlines are responding to this trend by bringing forward their own carbon neutrality targets and investing in low-emission technology. Qantas is leading the way on this front with its commitment to be a zeroemission airline by 2050. The world’s largest hotel operator, Marriott, has set itself a target to reduce its global carbon intensity by 30 per cent in the next five years. While Airbnb in the US has started actively marketing the comparable emission output of staying with one of their hosts compared to a traditional hotel.
The message is clear; there is a fast and permanent shift occurring in the global travel market towards carbon sustainability that is only likely to accelerate as global travel recovers from COVID.
