Anti-Travel Movement Targets Exotic Destinations

Exotic island resorts like Fiji, the Seychelles, and the Maldives could see upheaval in the coming decades if climate change swamps their idyllic shorelines, but these remote destinations also face a more immediate threat: new taxes and publicity campaigns urging travelers to help the environment by staying home.The anti-air travel movement, most active at the moment in Britain and Germany, is causing jitters among tourism officials, hoteliers, and airlines serving the Caribbean and South Asian getaways most favored by European tourists. In some less-developed spots, a drop in the number of visitors or merely an end to future growth could spell serious economic trouble.“It’s a quite a hot topic at the moment,” the London representative for the Caribbean Tourism Organization, Julia Hendry, said. “There are a number of lobby groups who have raised the issue of the impact of flying, especially flying long-haul.”A spokeswoman for Fiji’s national airline, Air Pacific, said the island nation wants to preserve its natural beauty by fighting climate change but doesn’t want taxes designed to advance that battle reducing the number of travelers who visit. “It’s a double-edged sword,” the spokeswoman, Candy Andrus, said. “If the price isn’t right, the passenger isn’t going to find us.”In Britain, the drive to constrain air travel is being led by an unlikely pair of organizations, Greenpeace and the Conservative Party.“There’s a culture of binge flying in this country,” a spokesman for Greenpeace UK, Ben Stewart, said. “We all have to look at how often we fly. … We’re trying to encourage people to take their holidays at home. It’s a beautiful country.”Last month, in a bid to outflank Prime Minister Blair’s Labour Party on the climate issue, a Conservative leader, David Cameron, floated a series of ideas to combat global warning. One proposal was to give each Briton a quota, or “Green Air Miles Allowance,” of one short-haul flight a year. Every flight above the quota would incur increased taxes.The Conservatives’ shadow budget minister, George Osborne, said new taxes on air travel would be offset by cuts in other levies. The goal is a “pay-as-you-burn, not pay-as-you-earn” tax system, he said.The proposals earned Mr. Cameron a visit from America’s leading global warming crusader, Vice President Gore. The Labour Party has ridiculed the Conservative plan as ineffective and a sure loser with voters. Mr. Blair has also rebuffed calls to limit his personal travel. However, the Labour-led government recently doubled departure taxes on air flights.In Germany, a top environmental official, Andreas Troge, joined with environmentalists last month in urging his countrymen to cut back on pleasure trips by air. “Anyone who flies to Southeast Asia should know that, by doing so, six tons of carbon dioxide are produced,” he told the newspaper Bild am Sonntag.A professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, Roger Pielke Jr., said calls to reduce international tourism will impact local economies long before global warming. “The effects they will have, to the extent people follow them, will be more immediate and much larger on tourist destinations than will the effects of climate change, which will take place over decades or more,” the professor said. “Until someone invents an airplane that runs on non-greenhouse gas-polluting fuel, it really is an intractable part of the problem. Why not do the easier things first?”A German climate researcher, Hans von Storch, said the campaign to reduce travel is cavalier. “One has to think measures through,” he said. “It’s a populistic thing to say, ‘These rich people with nothing better to do than destroy wildlife and drink beer and emit CO2 need to stop that, so I’m not flying to the Seychelles at all with all these other pigs.’… If people don’t fly there anymore, we should allow them to have some other means to make their living.”Asked if the travel reduction effort could hurt people in the developing world, Mr. Stewart of Greenpeace said, “I think people in those countries probably have got very mixed viewpoints on this.” He said the effects of global warming could also be devastating. “You’re talking about the possibility of actually losing countries,” he said.Mr. Stewart said the focus of his group’s campaign has not been long-haul travel but short air trips that have boomed in popularity since discount airlines cropped up in recent years, offering fares as low as $23 each way. Last month, Greenpeace descended on Gatwick Airport to protest British Airways’s decision to launch a new flight to a beach town, Newquay, that is about 300 miles from the capital.The Greenpeace activist noted that aviation is exempt from the international climate change agreement known as the Kyoto Accord, though there is evidence that the altitude at which planes expel emissions may be particularly harmful. The air sector’s rapid growth could make it all but impossible for Britain to meet its carbon-reduction targets, he said, adding, “If aviation expands as much as predicted, we’d have to decarbonize the rest of our economy.”The vacation-at-home phenomenon is being watched warily by American tourism officials. “I’m fully aware of some of the comments coming out of England and Germany,” the tourism liaison for Hawaii, Marsha Wienert, said. “Any initiative that would discourage air travel would affect our destination and the economy of our state.”Europeans account for about 1% to 2% of travel to Hawaii and Florida, which still get the vast majority of their visitors from America. However, Britain and Germany are the second and third biggest sources for foreign travelers to Florida, after Canada.The marketing director for Florida’s tourism office, Dale Brill, noted that foreign travel to the Sunshine State is already down about 5% since 2001. He said he is tracking the European calls to aid the climate through less travel but has “no sense of alarm about them at this point.”Still, Mr. Stewart acknowledged that reining in travel is difficult, even for Greenpeace staff. “Don’t think anybody here doesn’t wish we could go flying off to a rainforest in Florida and the Caribbean every week,” he said.

Anti-Travel Movement Targets Exotic Destinations

Anti-Travel Movement Targets Exotic Destinations

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