Elsewhere, local authorities are increasingly using disincentives or bans to protect local quality of life and prevent irresponsible behaviour. This includes Barcelona’s tax on cruise ship passengers and Mallorca’s sustainable tourism tax.

But which approach works better – Denmark’s carrots or Spain’s sticks? Research suggests carrots (or incentives) tend to be less effective than sticks (such as bans or penalties), even though people prefer carrots. This is partly because carrots, such as subsidised public transport, may not break car use habits, whereas sticks like congestion charges, are harder to ignore. A more effective and popular approach is to combine sticks with carrots – this helps break habits while reducing barriers to using alternatives.

At the UK Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations, we know a lot about how to encourage more eco-friendly actions, but we also know that people are inconsistent. Measures that result in behaviour change at home may not work for the same people when they’re on holiday.

Studies show that people tend to be less green on holiday than at home. There are several reasons for this. First, we may consciously want to maximise enjoyment while on holiday. This “enjoyment-focused mindset” means consuming more, leading to more pollution. People also see holidays as a break from obligations – this can include environmental obligations.

In some cases, it may simply be more difficult to be green in other places where infrastructure doesn’t support green behaviour: for example, hotels may not have recycling facilities. Another reason is that our habits are context-dependent, so when we’re somewhere new we may act differently.

We found that recycling habits were much weaker in workplaces and on holiday, than at home. Interviews and a survey of UK laboratory workers showed different factors predicted recycling and waste reduction habits across these contexts – the proportion of waste recycled in the home was almost double (67%) that recycled in the workplace (39%) and on holiday (38%).

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So people often find it much harder to be sustainable on vacation where the environment is controlled by someone else, and where cost, convenience and time are often prioritised to ensure a good holiday. Green obligations or habits may not travel with us on holiday, so tourism providers should consider ways of greening behaviour relevant to their tourism context. Effective examples include reducing plate sizes at buffets or requiring guests to opt-in if they want daily hotel room cleaning.

But how long-lived are the effects of green behaviour changes adopted while on holiday? Do people who try cycling or litter-picking on holiday continue to do so once they’ve come home?

Context is important – we often revert to old habits when we get home. Green behaviour in nature reserves, for example, is unlikely to spillover to the home unless there is supporting infrastructure (such as cycle paths) in both places.

This spillover effect is more likely when someone undergoes a process of transformation on holiday. Research on transformative tourist experiences finds that immersive, joyful, and enriching experiences – enabling tourists to actively engage with local communities and foster new skills – can trigger permanent behaviour changes. For example, the Mālama Hawaiʻi Program (“mālama” means give back) encourages tourists to volunteer with local communities, creating profound, immersive and enriching experiences.

Home and away

You don’t need to go abroad to experience these transformational effects. In our study of food festivals, we found that visitors’ level of engagement in a food festival (that is, food and drink tasting, discussing food with local producers and learning more about local food products) not only increased festival enjoyment but also drove locally-produced food purchases six months later.

Similarly, we found visitors’ level of behavioural engagement during a national cultural festival influenced cultural post-festival legacies. We categorised festival-goers into four groups based on their participation levels in festival activities – disengaged, observers, learners and doers. Both learners and doers were more likely to get involved in cultural and community events afterwards, possibly because they were more directly invested in hands-on activities during the festival.

Taken together, this means breaking habits and enabling good behaviours are both important for change either on holiday or at home. But behaviour change that spans contexts requires transforming people’s sense of self, connection to others and skills. Critically, providing monetary rewards is not enough to trigger transformation. That comes from deeper cognitive, emotional and social engagement.

Ultimately, this may involve reconceptualising tourism from being another space for (excessive) consumption to an opportunity for personal growth and giving back – or more mālama.

Lorraine Whitmarsh is professor of environmental psychology at the University of Bath, and Nicole Koenig-Lewis is professor of marketing at Cardiff University.

This article was first published by The Conversation. Read the original story here. 

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Thousands of tourists disembark from the cruise ships in the morning, flooding the 48-kilometre-long island during the day. And an estimated 20% of them go snorkelling to explore the beautiful coral reef just off the coast. This coral makes up part of the Mesoamerican Reef, which stretches from just north of Cancun all the way down to Honduras and is the second-largest in the world behind the Great Barrier Reef. Overtourism is just one of the threats that the ecosystems on these reefs face, along with the warming waters of climate change and a rise in deadly coral diseases.

The growing number of visitors to Cozumel has pitted the long-term health of the coral against those whose businesses depend on reef tourism. But that is beginning to change on the island. And it’s been changing in other parts of the world, too, thanks to marine biologists and environmental organizations working to make the coral reef tourism industry sustainable.

“We’re really starting to see the tourism sector as a key ally in conservation, because we all rely on the same goal, which is to have healthy coral reefs,” says Elizabeth Shaver, the coral conservation program manager for The Nature Conservancy’s Caribbean division.

While reef conservation efforts have been ongoing in Cozumel for years, the COVID-19 pandemic gave tour operators the chance to reexamine their approach. The pandemic was rough on the island’s tourism-centred economy. In the early months, cruise ships from Disney, Royal Caribbean, Carnival and Norwegian evaporated, the island’s waterfront became a ghost town, and the coral reefs got a break from snorkelling crowds. But this downtime also gave tour operators the chance to train staff – those who were able to keep them – in sustainable best practices (such as avoiding all contact with the reef and using proper fin techniques to avoid disturbing the coral).

While Cozumel’s cruise ship economy doesn’t evoke images of ecotourism, more tourists want to know that their visit hasn’t done (too much) harm to the planet, pushing tour operators to step up. “I think that was a very important ingredient in that conversation,” says Javier Pizaña-Alonso, a program manager for the Coral Reef Alliance who oversees the training of Cozumel tour operators about best practices so they can properly educate the tourists they bring to the reef.

Pizaña-Alonso says that the licensed operators who visit the marine protected area that covers the local reefs have all been taught these best practices, but there are still many “pirate” operators who operate without the proper permissions or training and with little enforcement. There are around 225 boats of different sizes that have permits to go into the marine protected area, but Pizaña-Alonso says he often sees up to 500 boats in a day in the park.

A harder conversation than getting tour operators on board with sustainability is with cruise ship companies and governments that want to maximize the number of cruise ship tourists that visit the island. Pizaña-Alonso says he has been in discussions with government officials about limiting the number of people cruise-ship companies bring to Cozumel, arguing that they could charge fewer people more money and make the same amount of revenue. “I don’t want to have 100 people pay me $1. I’d rather have 20 people that pay me $5. Let’s change that,” he says.

The issue isn’t so much that this type of tourism exists in Cozumel. Pizaña-Alonso says that reef tourism can happen sustainably, but the core issue is volume. In 2022, more than 1,100 cruise ships visited Cozumel, bringing almost three million visitors. More than three million cruise ship tourists are expected to visit this year. A proposed new pier that has caused controversy for years would add to that total. The federal government approved plans for a fourth pier, which has attracted protests from residents and environmentalists, before a judge suspended its construction last year, leaving it in limbo.

“The governments at these destinations are pushing for volume, and we gauge the tourism performance based on the people you bring to your destination rather than income for the local community. So, we’re trying to change the metrics that governments use for success,” Pizaña-Alonso says.

A way forward

Partnerships are also underway elsewhere in the Caribbean, between conservationists and the tourism industry, to conserve coral.

Last year, The Nature Conservancy teamed up with the Caribbean Hotel & Tourism Association and the United Nations Environment Programme to create a document called A Guide to Coral Reef Restoration for the Tourism Sector to help tourism operators overcome some of the barriers to being more sustainable. In the past, Shaver says, restoration efforts have been left mostly to scientists and coral reef managers, but the tourism industry has become increasingly involved in recent years. That’s partly due to the realization that coral is critically important for the GDP of many small countries.

In the Caribbean alone, reef-associated tourism generates US$8 billion a year from more than 11 million visitors, according to The Nature Conservancy. Conservationists are increasingly seeing the tourism sector as a valuable ally that can help spread the message of how important coral reefs are.

“Tourism infrastructure absolutely relies on reefs,” says Shaver. “The more the tourism industry sees the critical importance of reefs to maintaining their businesses, the more we’ll be able to engage together and the more impactful our conservation work will be.”

Pizaña-Alonso has plans to travel to different destinations within the Mesoamerican Reef area to teach around 12 people in each destination to become sustainability trainers for tour operators in those places. Last year, he and his team helped formalize a group called a destination management organization (DMO) for Cozumel, which brings together conservationists, local business associations and representatives from local government to protect the natural environment from the impacts of tourism. The Coral Reef Alliance is also helping to set up DMOs in Roatán, Honduras, and Belize – two other major cruise ship destinations where reef tourism is a central part of their economies.

Progress down under

In Australia, tour operators have been heavily involved in efforts to propagate coral at the Great Barrier Reef. Unprecedented back-to-back mass bleaching events in 2016 and 2017 impacted two-thirds of the coral in the Great Barrier Reef, threatening the collapse of ecosystems that are so central to Australian tourism. It proved to be a turning point for the tourism industry and the government in Australia in how they viewed the immediacy of the loss of coral.

Since 2018, scientists have been partnering with the tourism industry there in what’s called the Coral Nurture Program, in which tour operators are attaching corals onto the reef. Researchers are hoping that through the project they’ll be able to improve the efficiency of planting and growing coral and learn where it’s most likely to survive. The project (which has planted more than 80,000 corals) has already had some success, with upwards of 10% more coral cover in some areas.

“It’s really brought together the tourism industry [and conservationists] towards a common purpose,” says Emma Camp, a coral reef expert with the University of Technology Sydney who runs the program with two colleagues.

Camp says that while the actions of some bad tour operators tend to get a lot of attention, there are a lot of tour operators that are trying to do the right thing by teaching tourists about how to visit coral reefs without causing damage, as well as about the other threats the reefs face. And some of the information they are relaying back to scientists is invaluable, as they know these areas better than anyone.

“They’re the early warning system,” Camp says. “They feed knowledge back to the government and scientists. When stress events occur … it’s the tourism operators on the Great Barrier Reef that are likely to see it because they go out day after day after day.”

Taking a break

Another strategy authorities have tried in Cozumel to preserve coral is more drastic: shutting off access to parts of the reef for a few months at a time. This started in 2019, but Pizaña-Alonso says the project hasn’t produced enough data yet to prove whether it works, as coral grows very slowly. He has been more focused on limiting the number of people coming to the reefs than shutting off access entirely.

After all, when the cruise ships leave Cozumel at the end of the day, conservationists hope that the tourists who have visited the coral leave having learned a lesson not only about its beauty, importance and value, but also about the peril it faces. They hope they’ll spread the message that we’re losing this part of the natural world. And that we’ll continue losing it, as well as the jobs and economic growth it brings, if we don’t act fast.

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From a sustainability perspective, all that flying likely undid the climate benefits that accrued during the plane-free skies in COVID’s first year – evidence that pent-up demand for travel still exerts a greater emotional tug than global warming.

Indeed, tourism carbon is mostly about the journey. A round-trip flight for two between Toronto and a Caribbean sun destination for a week of rest and relaxation generates almost two tonnes of greenhouse gases, whereas a typical passenger vehicle produces about four to five tonnes in a whole year.

Yet the footprint of flying hasn’t slowed global demand for ecotourism, which was estimated to generate about US$180 billion in 2019, with revenue expected to almost double by the end of the decade. Much of that market is about nature and wilderness travel and off-grid experiences featuring basic accommodations. According to a survey this year by Booking.com, 71% of respondents wanted to green their travel plans, a 10% increase from 2021.

The urban hospitality sector, at pains to make itself relevant again in the Airbnb era, has sought to secure a slice of this pie with hotels promising sustainability features that go beyond the standard-issue reminders to patrons about used towels.

A U.K.-based energy retailer, Uswitch, earlier this year compiled a ranking of cities with the greatest number of green hotels, based on various public data sources and a so-called sustainability badge introduced late last year by Booking.com. “To achieve the approved sustainable travel badge,” the survey notes, “each hotel has to share their carbon emissions, water consumption, food consumption and waste, animal welfare, and many other environmental factors.”

In the green building industry, net-zero is a building that produces as much energy as it uses. For those of us focused on the climate crisis, there’s a higher bar, to have a building that doesn’t use any fossil fuels.

-Bruce Becker, architect at Becker & Becker

Canadian cities, as it turns out, fare quite well, and especially Vancouver, which isn’t all that surprising, given that the city’s electricity is almost entirely derived from hydro power. According to Uswitch, more than 40% of Vancouver’s hotels qualify for Booking’s sustainability badge, with Stockholm and Toronto ranking second and third globally.

One of the Toronto properties cited is 1 Hotel, a new luxury venue that’s part of the Starwood Capital Group’s vast real estate empire, via a subsidiary called SH Hotels and Resorts. There are eight other 1 Hotels, in places like New York, Tennessee and South Beach, Florida. According to SH’s corporate director of sustainability and impact, Corinne Hanson, “[Starwood founder] Barry Sternlicht, with the inception of the 1 Hotels brand, wanted to create something that was sustainability driven, mission driven, both in its core design and its operations.”

Hanson, who also sits on Starwood’s ESG board, rhymes off some of the features, and they do include variations on the theme of garden-variety green building elements. The company sought to use “found objects” to create some of its decor and sourced its furniture through a partnership with Just Be Woodsy, a Toronto company that salvages wood from felled city trees to makes its products. There’s an onsite composter, with the results used for the facility’s garden and plantings. Hanson says 85% of the hotel’s waste is diverted from landfill, and the goal is to achieve zero waste.

Another feature: that 1 Hotels aims to reduce embodied carbon by using existing buildings where possible. “We always try to look for buildings to repurpose, so we can try to address embodied carbon, even though we might not always be able to offset the total of our embodied carbon,” Hanson says. “We try to be quite transparent about that.”

In the case of 1 Hotel Toronto, this particular claim can be seen as an elegant elision of eco-spin, savvy business strategy and, well, the truth. The building itself, in the rapidly intensifying King West area, was home for several years to another swishy boutique hotel, the Thompson, a Toronto International Film Festival party favourite. It was shut down in 2019 for a “facelift,” per The Hollywood Reporter, so it could be rebranded as a 1 Hotel. The new luxury version was to open in 2020, but that timetable got scotched for all the obvious reasons.

A more compelling example of recycling buildings can be found in New Haven, Connecticut, where the former corporate headquarters of the Armstrong Rubber Co., a fortress-like Brutalist office building that opened in 1970, has been transformed into the Hotel Marcel, part of Hilton’s Tapestry Collection, whatever that means. (The hotel is named for Marcel Breuer, the original architect.) Hilton claims it will be the first net-zero hotel in the United States.

[Starwood founder] Barry Sternlicht, with the inception of the 1 Hotels brand, wanted to create something that was sustainability driven, mission driven, both in its core design and its operations.

-Corinne Hanson, SH Hotels and Resorts’s corporate director of sustainability and impact

“In the green building industry, net-zero is a building that produces as much energy as it uses,” Bruce Becker, an architect who acquired the long-vacant landmark structure, told The New York Times. “For those of us focused on the climate crisis, there’s a higher bar, to have a building that doesn’t use any fossil fuels.”

It’s not easy to determine whether these projects represent corporate greenwashing, a new twist on luxury accommodation or some kind of genuine improvement. Certainly, salvaging a giant concrete edifice from the wrecking ball would seem like a progressive gesture that fully embraces one of the core tenets of the circular economy. With 1 Hotel, however, the storyline seems to include a lot of branding alongside the eco-feature shopping list, although Hanson insists SH is “a cause rather than a brand.”

She acknowledges that Starwood, as a large real estate asset manager, has yet to make public a detailed accounting of its carbon performance, despite the company’s home page proudly announcing that it is both a carbon-neutral company and a signatory of the Principles for Responsible Investment. The first quantified ESG report is expected next year.

Still, one could certainly argue that urban tourism, which makes use of well-trafficked places with transit and infrastructure, is more sustainable than travel to stunning and remote locales found at the far end of complicated and carbon-intensive transportation network. Those journeys may leave a lot more footprints, carbon and otherwise, in places that once had few of them. Who is to say whether it is morally superior to travel to the Far North to take in the tragic majesty of a warming ecosystem as opposed to booking a room in a swanky hotel with all the eco-fixings that also happens to be in the middle of a big city.

Is the trend toward hyper-sustainable hotels merely going to generate more air travel? Given the seeming paradox, what is SH communicating to potential customers looking for sustainable experiences? As Hanson readily responds, “I think that’s the right question.”

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The widespread floods exacerbated the already dire economic state of the Maasai Mara caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has gutted the tourism industry, says Brian Kearney-Grieve, executive director of the Sidekick Foundation, the primary funder of the Mara Elephant Project. MEP, as it is known, protects the region’s 2,400 pachyderms by mitigating poaching and human-elephant conflict and preserving habitat. As a keystone species, elephants are invaluable to the Maasai Mara, eating brush and trees and spreading seeds via their dung, keeping the Serengeti plains fertile and open for herds of grazing animals.

The Maasai Mara, which is part of the vast Serengeti plains, draws thousands of foreigners every year to watch the spectacular Great Migration, when more than two million animals – wildebeest, zebras and gazelles – undertake their annual odyssey from Tanzania north into Kenya, making the region the country’s most valuable tourism asset.

The threat to elephants lies with the revenue-base collapse, says Kearney-Grieve. The Maasai tribes people, renowned for their extravagant beadwork and tall stature, are the legal landowners of the Maasai Mara. Together with such stakeholders as ecotourism camp owners, they manage 14 areas, called “conservancies.” These are lease agreements worth about US$10 million a year that is derived from tourism. Payments are given to individual Maasai landowners in exchange for keeping their fields open to wildlife, rather than growing crops or grazing livestock.

This past spring, because of COVID-19, the conservancies were negotiating reduced lease rates with the Maasai landowners while scrambling to find emergency funds to pay the teams of rangers and related expenses, such as vehicles, used to keep a lid on poaching.

Their fears about a possible increase in poaching proved to be justified. In late April, Rhino Conservation Botswana reported that poachers had killed six rhino after the global pandemic shut down tourism in the southern African nation.

MEP’s conservation work includes a remarkably successful anti-poaching intelligence network. And while MEP hadn’t detected a rise in poaching as of late April, Kearney-Grieve fears that poachers from neighbouring Tanzania may take advantage of the absence of tourists and the reduced ranger numbers to venture into the Maasai to shoot elephants for their ivory.

Farmers will also be more protective of their crops in the upcoming months, because of the economic hardship, and therefore less tolerant of crop-raiding elephants, says Kearney-Grieve. “Communities are so under threat in terms of their income that they might be more aggressive in terms of how they protect their crops from elephants.”

Roberta Staley is a Vancouver-based author, magazine editor and writer and filmmaker.

Read Roberta Staley’s feature:

Banking on the wildlife trade

The finance sector could hold the key to stopping the trade that puts the health of millions of animals and humans at risk

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About 7.3 million hectares of forest – an area the size of Panama – is lost every year to deforestation, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. At the current pace, the Earth’s tropical rainforests will be gone within the next century.

The demand side

An alternative development model is clearly needed for countries like Papua New Guinea (PNG) that struggle with rule of law and corrupt governance, in order to meet UN Sustainable Development Goals and lift Papua New Guineans out of poverty while ensuring environmental integrity.

Much will depend upon China, not only because of its strengthened trade relations via the Belt and Road Initiative but also because it is the destination for PNG’s raw logs. Beibei Yin, the China policy and advocacy senior advisor for Global Witness, says China should extend its own sustainability policies to PNG. China has invested US$350 billion into programs like forest conservation and erosion reduction as well as poverty reduction to protect its own natural resources and adopt a more sustainable and long-term development model. “But China hasn’t broadened its ambitions overseas yet,” Yin says.

Pressure can be brought to bear by China’s trading partners, says Yin, pointing to an EU-China joint study, titled “Feasibility analysis of the incorporation of timber legality requirements into Chinese laws or regulations to promote trade in legal forest products,” which promotes mandatory laws and regulations that would oblige checks on the legality of timber imports. This is a way for China to protect its global trading reputation, says Yin. Unfortunately, “progress has been slow.” (One Chinese company, Nature Home, which manufactures floorings, wooden doors, cabinets, etc., has publicly committed not to buy any SABL-sourced wood, says Yin.)

Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), the 21-nation Pacific Rim association that includes Canada, China and the United States, could play a significant role in promoting sustainability in PNG. For the first time, PNG, which is APEC’s poorest member, hosted the organization’s annual summit this past November in Port Moresby. APEC’s stated priorities include sustainability as well as innovative and inclusive growth, sustainable agriculture in response to climate change and a rules-based multilateral trading system.

As a leading example, Canada has strict laws preventing the import of products illegally sourced. These include the Wild Animal and Plant Protection and Regulation of International and Interprovincial Trade Act. The act makes it illegal to import illegally harvested plants, including wood, so importers do need to know what they are buying or risk potentially millions of dollars in fines, according to the Government of Canada Justice Laws website.

At the vanguard of progressive legislation is a new bill introduced this past February in California titled the California Deforestation-Free Procurement Act. It broadens America’s Lacey Act, which banned trade on illegally sourced wood products in 2008. The Deforestation-Free Procurement Act applies to almost all deforestation commodities such as palm oil, beef, leather and soy, while providing misdemeanor charges for companies that violate it, in addition to sanctions. The act must be passed by the California senate.

Alternative income stream

The village of Labablia, Papua New Guinea. Tallulah Photography.

Kisi Issack’s village of Labablia, an informal collection of wood and grass homes on stilts, sits a coconut’s throw away from the Solomon Sea tideline on the Huon Coast in Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea (PNG). Labablia is isolated from the outside world, accessible only by a picturesque, if bone-shaking, motorboat ride from the port city of Lae, PNG’s second largest metropolis with just over 100,000 people.

Issack, tiny and sinewy, with a weathered and kindly face, shelters in the shade out of the 30 C-plus muggy heat, slacking her thirst with just-opened, sweet, nutty coconut water. Issack is a senior guide and secretary with the Kamiali Wildlife Management Area (KWMA), founded by a Dutch NGO two decades ago. Today, KWMA is a biological research station that attracts scientists and hardy ecotourists (who pay C$400 for a five day visit) study the surrounding lowland tropical forest and the coral reefs as well as monitor leatherback turtles, which come to Lababia’s white sandy beaches every year to lay their eggs. Decreasing in number, leatherbacks, the world’s largest turtle, are classified as vulnerable, due in large part to human consumption of their billiard ball-size eggs.

Issack is proud of the role the villagers of Labablia have come to play as land and oceanic stewards. Not only are they helping protect their ancestral homeland, but the money that they make from tourism helps to support health and education in the community of 800, who live dispersed on thousands of hectares that they own under Papua New Guinea’s system of customary landownership. This alternative income stream is a bulwark against logging companies and palm oil plantations, since it funds vital infrastructure, such as community schools. Other indigenous groups, Issack says, have given up their traditional lands to logging interests in return for money, only to face long-term environmental effects. “Logging is short-term benefit,” she says.

As part of their KWMA stewardship, Issack and her fellow villagers are focusing on initiatives to preserve the sandy beaches where the leatherback turtles lay their eggs. Climate change and rising tides — especially noticeable since 2016 — are eroding beaches. In order to preserve these crucial nesting sites, Issack says there are plans underway to plant kalapulim trees close to the tideline to act as wave breakers and anchor the beach. Preserving the integrity of the land and waterways is a way to honour the ancestors, says Issack, while “conserving it for the future of our children.”

Read Roberta Staley’s feature: Papua New Guinea on the chopping block

Roberta Staley is a magazine editor and writer specializing in medical, science and business reporting.

Photos by Tallulah Photography.

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