The Future Of Travel (In The Post-Covid-19 Era)

Can travel & tourism have a net positive contribution to conservation, the environment and the community, asks Sonu Shivdasani

- Sonu Shivdasan

Travel and flying are often highlighted as prime examples of human behaviour that contribute to global warming, and things that need to change with immediate effect if we are to hand over to the next generation a world similar to what we have been able to experience and love in our own lifetimes.

While air travel will account for a bulk of an individual’s own ecological footprint, it today still accounts for only about 2% of greenhouse gases. The damage it causes pales when one considers the contribution to global warming of agriculture, especially the beef industry, where the numbers are 10 to 20 times that of air travel.

There are also some examples of tourism over-development such as the coast of Spain where developers constructed large concrete jungles that today remain ghost towns for most of the year. The local community lost out big time and their overall quality of life deteriorated. for the developers tended to be foreign, generally engaged foreigners and the tourists tended to consume packaged products brought in from outside. wherever local ingredients or resources were consumed, it was at the expense of the local community. So, in general, the profits of the operations were repatriated, salaries were spent back home, and the local community rarely benefitted from this new commerce. They just suffered from the inflationary pressures on certain qualities of life that they had taken for granted such as cheap seaside living, or fish, which they could no longer afford.

PWC have established a measurement index—T.I.M.M. (Total Impact Monitoring & Measurement)—that they are encouraging governments to use in order to drive behavioural change that avoids such examples in the future.