They are all recipients of last-chance tourists, travellers keen to experience a place before it disappears or is transformed beyond recognition, the victim of climate change or globalisation.
In 2016, the Journal of Sustainable Tourism published a study titled “Last chance tourism and the Great Barrier Reef”, which found that 69 per cent of visitors to the natural wonder felt a sense of urgency, to see it before the water gets too warm, the corals all bleach and the 2,300km-long ecosystem dies.
The issue with this is the role these tourists play in the reef’s ultimate extinction.
To reach their destination, the visitor will board a fossil-fuelled plane, and seeing as the reef is in a far-flung corner of the globe, that is in most cases going to be a large, long-haul fossil-fuelled plane.
As they sit back to consume instantly forgettable food and films, our environmentally minded traveller is in many cases ignorant of the carbon impact they are making; after all, the airline industry hardly makes a song and dance of how polluting it is.
According to Cathay Pacific’s carbon-emission calculator, an economy-class round trip from Hong Kong to Cairns, the international airport that is closest to the corals, will produce 0.96 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions – about 15 per cent of the average Hongkonger’s annual carbon footprint – which the airline invites passengers to offset for a grand total of HK$22.65 (US$2.9).
Offset or not, any CO2 that ends up in the atmosphere advances the warming of the climate and the ocean, contributing to coral bleaching and the killing of the Great Barrier Reef.
Other tourists want to visit places before everyone else does and the experiences are ruined. The very act of doing so erodes the authenticity the last-chancer so desperately seeks.
It’s the sort of irony Alanis Morissette might sing about, but it has a much more transformative influence than a black fly in your chardonnay or rain on your wedding day.
There are those who argue that last-chance tourism raises public awareness of climate breakdown or overtourism but the difference between understanding the issues and taking action to help remedy them remains wide.
Eke Eijgelaar, a researcher and lecturer at the Breda University of Applied Sciences, in the Netherlands, said that he didn’t believe the awareness raised outweighed the negative effects tourism can have on increasingly fragile environments.
Last-chance travel also goes by another name, doom tourism. Suddenly, that trip to see Antarctica’s melting glaciers, or the Pacific Island nation of Tuvalu, which is disappearing under rising seas and will reportedly be uninhabitable by 2050, doesn’t sound quite so appealing, does it?
Tourism Observer
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