With sustained winds of nearly 300 kilometres per hour, storm surges of four metres, and half a metre of rain, Hurricane Melissa flattened much of western Jamaica, doing somewhere between US$8 and $15 billion in damage. But even as roofs were still flying off churches and palms were bending like stalks of grass, Edmund Bartlett, Jamaica’s minister of tourism, was already giving interviews to international media, encouraging travellers to visit and to visit soon.

The almost manic push to have all the island’s hotels operational by mid-December, when the peak season begins, threw into sharp relief a contradiction that underlies the Caribbean as a whole: it depends on an industry that, in some respects, is also responsible for its undoing.

The Caribbean is the most tourism-dependent region in the world. It is also one of the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Warming oceans, rising sea levels and increasingly frequent extreme weather events represent existential threats to the region: not only to residents but also to the tourism industry on which they depend. Sustainability, in this context, is not a nice add-on, but a necessity. If tourism is to remain a mainstay of Caribbean economies, it has to be resilient to the impacts of climate change, protective of increasingly fragile ecosystems and beneficial to local economies as a whole.

It’s asking a lot of an industry that, as Antiguan author Jamaica Kincaid argued in her 1988 book A Small Place, exhibits a similarly extractive quality to the slave-based plantation economies of the 17th and 18th centuries. Kincaid draws a direct line from Caribbean sugar to sand: resources that have been exploited by foreign powers with little to no regard for the well-being of locals.

“Tourism is both a lifeline and a liability,” says Therez Walker, who grew up in Antigua and is now a lecturer on sustainable tourism at NHL Stenden University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands. “It’s a very uncomfortable reality that a lot of people don’t want to face.”

Half a century ago, when the imperial powers that colonized the Caribbean dropped preferential trade arrangements for their agricultural exports – primarily bananas, sugar and rum – these tropical islands, with World Bank support, set their sights on the postwar middle class’s growing appetite for beach vacations. Tourism ministries were established and tax incentives were offered to foreign developers. In 1970, some four million international guests visited the Caribbean. Since then, the figure has increased almost 10-fold.

Tourism now accounts for an average of 11% of the gross domestic product of the 33 political entities – sovereign states, dependencies and overseas territories – that make up the Caribbean. But in some countries, the sector constitutes a virtual monoculture. In Antigua, for instance, tourism generates 88% of the country’s GDP and provides 91% of all jobs, according to the World Travel and Tourism Council.

Such dependency on a single industry creates vulnerability, particularly when only a fraction of its economic benefits flow back to the country. The vast majority of revenue generated by Caribbean tourism lands with the foreign operators who control it: airlines, cruise companies and hotel chains. The United Nations World Tourism Organization puts the level of economic “leakage” from Caribbean tourism at about 80%. At the same time, local governments have to contend with 100% of the waste that the industry generates.

Climate change is only amplifying this vulnerability. Over the last five decades, rising sea temperatures have cost the Caribbean almost half of its hard coral cover: a blow to the marine life that coral sustains as well as the huge revenues generated by snorkelling and diving. At current rates, sea level rise is expected to reduce the Caribbean’s sandy beaches by half and to force the closure of a third of existing hotels by the end of this century. Likewise, extreme heat and storm events like Hurricane Melissa are becoming more intense and frequent.

When Walker, who has been based in the Netherlands since 2022, returns home to Antigua, she feels both frustration and sadness. The beach she went to as a child is barely recognizable. The water is higher, the shore depleted. Gone are the mangrove swamps and the thriving fish populations they once hosted. In her community, water is in chronically short supply: many households have running water only twice a week. When she drives past water trucks parked outside the island’s all-inclusive resorts, she is resentful – not of the guests inside, but of decision-makers who have failed to protect domestic and environmental interests.

The needs of tourists and residents are often not aligned. Drought for locals translates into a sun-filled vacation for visitors. The mangroves that serve as natural barriers against erosion and storms are the enemy of the pristine sand beach. The protected coastline that hosts animal, plant and marine life is an obstacle to shoreline resorts.

“Our policymakers go to UN climate conventions and talk about our vulnerability,” Walker says. “And then they come home and approve another huge development on an ecologically sensitive coastline.”

According to Beienetch “Bennie” Watson, who teaches tourism policy and planning at the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica, the problem with Caribbean tourism is its foundation in a “colonial logic” that is top-down and externally driven. “Those seated around the table haven’t reflected the voice of ‘the people,’” she says. “The people’s vision of tourism hasn’t been heard.”

But in recent years, Watson has seen a shift, prompted in part by the COVID-19 pandemic, when Caribbean hotels stood empty and tourism revenue dropped by half. Some islands took the opportunity to promote homestays and longer-term accommodation options. Others directed visitors to more tailored experiences in eco-, adventure, and rural tourism. Watson is encouraged by a younger generation of traveller that, often prompted by social media, wants to explore outside resort walls.

A 2025 World Bank report on the future of Caribbean tourism emphasized the importance of moving beyond “sea, sun and sand,” pointing out how the short-term economic benefits of volume tourism – all-inclusive resorts and cruise tourism – have overshadowed their high environmental, energy, water-consumption and emissions costs.

Three months after Melissa, Jamaican Tourism Minister Bartlett went on an international marketing blitz to boost investor and traveller confidence in his island. At a luncheon in New York City, he announced that 70% of Jamaica’s hotels were up and running: a remarkable accomplishment.

But Watson, who lives in Kingston, has witnessed recovery on another level. Members of her church go out every Thursday to help communities that are rebuilding. She says the hurricane has proven something important to Jamaicans: that the island is close-knit, solidarity is strong, and residents’ needs matter.

Therez Walker agrees that change has to come from below. “We need to demand more of tourism,” she says. “This is an ‘us’ problem.”

Naomi Buck is a Toronto-based writer.

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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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Meanwhile, the very communities meant to benefit from a tourism boom have been grappling with record-breaking summer heat, their landscapes charred by wildfires as global heating alters ecosystems and drives extreme weather at beloved destinations.

The post Blistering heat is ravaging tourism hotspots. Can the industry reinvent itself? appeared first on Corporate Knights.