“Coolcations” and “Last-Chance Tourism”: How Climate Change Is Upending Vacation Planning

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CHAPTERS 

[00:02:15]: Changing travel preferences, including shifts toward cooler destinations 

[00:04:46]: Heat risks for tourists and factors shaping vulnerability 

[00:05:57]: Climate impacts on winter tourism and ski-dependent regions 

[00:10:14]: Tourism’s role in both contributing to and responding to climate change 

[00:12:30]: Emissions from travel, particularly aviation, and pathways to more sustainable tourism 

[00:20:14]: Travel behavior and interest in climate-affected destinations

TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00.06] 

It's summertime in the Northern Hemisphere, and that means that for many of us, it's time for summer vacation. But increasingly, those summer travel plans are looking slightly different. Recent years have been some of the warmest on record, and 2023 was the northern hemisphere's hottest summer in 2000 years. That translates to sweltering days at the beach or walking around a new city. And warmer weather can also increase the likelihood of hurricanes and wildfires and other disasters elsewhere. Climate change can mean unreliable snowfall for ski towns or hurricanes for tropical resorts, and pose challenges to vacation travels that so often depend on being able to predict precisely what kind of weather you're going to encounter. From the Migration Policy Institute, this is Changing Climate, Changing Migration, a podcast all about how climate change is affecting human mobility. My name is Julian Hattem. Usually on this podcast we talk about long term movement or permanent migration. Today we're mixing it up. When people go on vacation, it tends to be just a few days or maybe a week or two. But it's a type of human movement all the same, and it's one that's taking on a new shape in the era of climate change.

[00:01:22.22] 

Today, I'm speaking with Daniel Scott, one of the world's leading researchers on climate change and sustainable tourism. He's a professor and research chair at the University of Waterloo's Department of Geography and Environmental Management in Canada, and he's also an international research fellow at the School of Hospitality and Tourism at the University of Surrey in the UK. Daniel, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

[00:01:45.22] 

Great for having me. Thank you so much, Julian.

[00:01:48.03] 

So lots of us in the Northern Hemisphere are taking trips this summer. We're going to the beach, we're going to new cities, we're hitting up exotic locales. Lots of times those destinations depend on an expectation of a certain kind of weather. And is it the case that excessive heat and increasingly hot summers that we're experiencing and all of the risks that go along with that, including the chances of wildfires or hurricanes, are those changing some of the general patterns of tourism and vacations?

[00:02:13.23] 

Yeah, certainly heat has been a focus over the last two to three summers. We had sort of a crazy heat dome in northwestern US and Canada and then the UK. Nobody anticipated 40 degrees Celsius. Sorry, I'm speaking in Celsius, but 40 degrees Celsius in the UK in London and then last summer, particularly in Greece, wildfires in Western Canada, etc. So yeah, media is paying a lot of attention to it and we are absolutely seeing anecdotal evidence that people are starting to shift where they choose that sort of seeking. The beach is still part of summer as a ritual. I don't think that will ever go away. But we're seeing a new trend. The European media is discussing it a lot and in a couple of countries, Norway, Sweden are actually marking this sort of cool cation is what they're calling it, to bring people, you know, away from the Mediterranean, away from the heat. And in Rome and Athens that are, they're closing. The Acropolis was closed last summer for three weeks at different times because of the heat risk parts of Rome, et cetera. So yeah, we're starting to see that shift, but it's still sort of untangling it from the legacy impacts of COVID So the big picture, the macro tourism data, we still need a bit more analysis on that to see if this is to what extent that shift's happening because it's still, we're still in that rebound recovery from COVID in much of the tourism industry.

[00:03:42.11] 

Meaning that basically no one traveled during a year or two, 2020-2021 vacations that dropped off. And now there's been a bit of a...

[00:03:49.20] 

That when people really discover, you know, COVID, depending on where you were, what state or country, you know, COVID, if there's any small positive that came from it, it showed people, it made people look at what amazing things they have in their own state or the state next door or not too far. So they had to vacation closer to home. And some people shifted their, their vacationing closer to home. They didn't want to get on aircraft, they didn't feel a need to fly to Mexico or whatever the case. They could find what they wanted in, in Vegas or something like that. So that that shift is still sort of undergoing and we don't know what the long term effects of that will, will be. That being said, like on the heat side, and we've seen that the coverage again with, with some tourists dying and there was 1300 or more that died in the Hajj, the pilgrimage, but we've seen them in US national parks and others. You know, tourists are particularly vulnerable to heat there. There's a couple factors. One, they're not acclimatized to where they've gone. So you New York City and you've arrived in Dubai, you know, every day is now a heat risk day for you from where you came from or from Toronto to go to Orlando.

[00:05:05.22] 

They're not ready for it necessarily. And they're active during the hottest part of the day like you want to. You've paid to be there. You want to see everything you can see. So they're, they're doing that when they may not be the best choice. And, and, you know, they, some particular seniors are on medications that actually interfere with their ability to cope with heat. And then you've got language barriers. So even if a place like Athens has a heat warning, a US Tourist, Canadian tourists may not understand the language. And you're not usually linked into local media, so you may not even hear it. So all of those things sort of combine to put tourists often more at risk. So we do need, I think, you know, you pointed out we need to do a better job of understanding that heat risk for tourists by the tourists themselves, but also the tourism operators and destinations as well.

[00:05:56.01] 

And it's summer now, we're talking about summer. But I assume there are similar changes happening in other seasons. I think about ski towns, right. That need snow. Obviously, if it's too warm for snow, there's no snow. What happens then? I guess, are there other types of climate impacts and that are affecting tourism mobility? Generally speaking?

[00:06:15.14] 

Yeah. So in terms of other types of seasonal changes. Absolutely. We're seeing different market segments. You meant, you mentioned skiing is an important one that we've seen over the last couple of years. Last year in particular, everything east of the Rockies was really difficult in the Midwest and New England ski areas and things like that. So we've, we're definitely seeing a shift in ski seasons that were getting longer. From the, like, the 1980s to the 90s to the 2000s, ski seasons were actually getting longer even though it was getting warmer, because we're investing millions, hundreds of millions in snowmaking that shifted in the 2010. So that stabilized or now seasons are actually getting shorter even with that snowmaking capability. So that's an interesting shift. You know, institutional factors are still real important. If you've got kids, there's a school holiday block, you know, Christmas, Easter, summer holidays. And so you still are. You have to follow those sort of seasonal cycles. So that's part of it. But you're absolutely right. We're seeing people choose their ski holidays later. So when ski areas have more time through the Christmas holidays to develop this with snowmaking their snowpack, if you go a little bit later.

[00:07:29.21] 

So we're seeing a bit of a shift later into the winter in those cases, for sure.

[00:07:34.06] 

And I guess what happens to the places that get left behind if you're, you know, if you are a ski town or, you know, a summer beach town and you depend on people coming kind of all season long. And now their patterns are changing. Fewer people are coming. I guess I assume that a lot of these places are very, their economies are very tourism dependent. Are there big ripple effects throughout the kind of local industries and what are the long term repercussions of that potential?

[00:08:00.11] 

Yeah, that's, it's a really important question on the economic. I mean livelihoods are all intertwined with that employment and that, you know, as you point out for the destination community is really important. But that scales right up to the country scale, you know, and there are some really important climate justice implications when you get to that global scale. Some of the work that we've done shows some of the most vulnerable tourism economies to climate change are small island developing states. So parts of the Caribbean Pacific islands and others. They're also amongst the lowest in terms of their contribution to emissions, to the, to the problem that's causing. And you know, tourism as a whole globally is roughly 10% of the global economy, roughly 10% of employment. But in those countries it can be, even Jamaica is close to 50%. There are some smaller islands that it's over 75%. So COVID showed us when you take tourism out of those economies, you know, their borrowing costs go up, credit ratings go down. They have to borrow a lot to support health care and other things. So if tourism is hit hard, as you said in some of those, particularly those countries, it makes it a lot more difficult and, and you will see people move out as a result of that.

[00:09:20.24] 

From a livelihoods perspective, when covet, shut down tourism, many people shifted to other parts of the economy or left countries. They're, they're not coming back to the sector. So we have a little bit of a taste of what climate change will do in those economies learning from what COVID did to them.

[00:09:39.20] 

And that's super fascinating and tragic, I guess in some case. I wonder if there's a bit of a, kind of a downward spiral too, because low lying small island economies also need to invest in seawalls and climate protections adaptations. And if the economy declines, people leave. You probably can't invest in those things and then everything kind of aggravates. It's like, I guess to use a bad metaphor, it's a snowball effect kind of, right?

[00:10:04.17] 

Yeah, there's, there's a feedback effect on that both on, on the economy and then people's that sort of push factor to leave in some cases. And, and the, the Maldives is a really interesting example of a, a country that's that's recognized. Their leadership has recognized that paradox. They've said, you know, but we're going to continue to rely on the tourism industry knowing it's a high emission sector, but it's the only way they can gain enough revenue to support adaptation in the country. And they know the international community is not coming to the rescue. They're looking, you know, they're seeing what decisions have been made. They know nobody's coming to help them. So they have to raise as much capital as they can to invest in their own adaptation. And they recognize they have to do that through an industry that has people flying from long distances that's contributing to the very problem that's, that's the source of their demise physically in their case. And so, so yeah, that, that is that sort of dual edge sort of. Tourism contributes to the problem. In some cases it's, it's a solution. But particularly coastal areas, as you said, you know, often what we talk about in tourism impacts are these extreme events that we see.

[00:11:19.23] 

Wildfires that cost Canada's tourism industry hundreds of millions. There was a great study in Australia there, there what they call the Black Summer. I think it was 2019 and 20, it cost nearly $3 billion in Australian dollars to the industry that year. So huge impacts from those extremes. But those slow onset, we call them impacts, sea level rise being one of them, that will utterly transform coastal tourism from the US to the Caribbean to Australia, the Mediterranean over the next sort of several decades. So it's much slower but it'll have transformative impacts as people lose their be. Nobody wants to pay high end dollars for a hotel that doesn't have a beach anymore, those sorts of things. So yeah, really real important knock on effects that we'll see in the decades ahead.

[00:12:09.08] 

You mentioned that tourism itself is a high emission sector and I curious about that. I want to drill down on this a little bit more. Is it flights? I mean why, why is tourism so such a large contributor to climate change? And is the industry changing to become more sustainable in some way?

[00:12:27.14] 

Yeah. So we did the first estimate on what tourism as a sector contributes to global emissions back and we did that for the UN World Tourism Organization in 2007 and then it was about 5%. So putting that in country context, that's Canada and the UK put together. So not trivial. Now the newer studies that have come out put it in sort of the 8 to 10% range. So it's actually increasing relative to the economy. And so it's nothing we can ignore over time. The biggest source is transportation, as you pointed out. And of those, the biggest source there is aviation. And it's recognized by the IPCC and governments as a really hard to abate sector. We don't have an immediate technology that you could say like you can with ground transport where you can electrify it, you can reduce those emissions. You can't do that with aircraft.

[00:13:26.21] 

We're not going to switch to blimps overnight or whatever.

[00:13:28.24] 

No. And, and yeah, I mean there are small electric aircraft that, that are, look, have promising and so those could be regional aircraft in the 2000s, 2000s, but they're not going to get you across the Atlantic or wherever you want to go. So that's where we have sustainable aviation fuels that right now cost about four times what Jet A does. So there's that cost factor and there's so little of it and that is, it's really difficult to scale that. And so that is part of the challenge. And then some have talked about hydrogen having some influence for aviation, but then you would have to literally convert the entire fleet in the matter of about three decades for aircraft that have two to three decade lifetimes have dual fueling sources and they're still on the drawing board. So that's not going to be a 2050 solution, put it that way. Maybe in the longer term, well beyond that. But shipping wants the hydrogen too. Right. And there's only so much green hydrogen too go around. So that's the one sector we don't have an immediate solution for. That being said, I mean you can have a net zero holiday if now if you want, if, if somebody from Boston or New York or if you've got a clean grid and in an EV and you go skiing in New England somewhere.

[00:14:43.02] 

Well, their transportation's essentially decarbonized. Much of the lifts and things if you're... If we're in Quebec and our provinces where you've got a clean grid, you can travel regionally with a very low carbon footprint. So it be done, it's a slightly different form of tourism, but those are the decisions people have to make if they really want to contribute to the solution of climate change. There's a great UK study that showed most people had no idea that one of the biggest sources of their emissions or one of the best actions they could take wasn't getting out of their car to go to work, wasn't recycling, wasn't changing their diet, it was taking one less flight for holidays. So it's one of the biggest, you know, actions that people can take if they do fly regularly.

[00:15:29.14] 

Are you seeing that? I mean, are people making that choice? Are we seeing trends that people are choosing to take different kinds of trips? I mean, maybe post COVID people are traveling more locally or less not taking trips?

[00:15:40.19] 

Definitely in, in Europe, you know, there was the whole flight shaming thing in, in Sweden and, and we did. And not just in Sweden, but in many parts of Europe. And so we, yeah, there were concerted efforts by, you know, a documented number of Swedish travelers and others to, to do things differently. That hasn't translated to other parts of the world to the same extent. But I think, you know, some of the academic surveys and the traveler surveys do see that people, you know, are starting to recognize how much emissions are tied up, particularly in flying. And some of them are just making, you know, they're still flying. But you can cut your emissions in half if you want to have a beach holiday in your New York. Well, rather than going to Thailand or South America, you go to the Caribbean or you go to Florida, you get the same holiday, but at a quarter or a half the distance. Well, the emissions are roughly, you know, cut in half, cut in the quarter. So you don't have to necessarily. Now that's not going to get us to net zero, but it is going to make a big dent in things if people just choose different destinations to do the same sorts of holidays. So it's not saying don't travel, it's just travel differently.

[00:16:50.12] 

I guess, to that point of travel differently. Are there some places that are benefiting either from changing habits to reduce climate emissions or just generally from climate change? You talked about "coolcations", people going to cooler weather locales. Can you talk, are we seeing a noticeable impact in places like that? And how are communities like that able to respond to presumably potentially an influx of new visitors?

[00:17:16.13] 

Yeah, so in places where there is good train transport, we're seeing that a lot in Europe and in China where they do have good high speed train networks, as some people get out of aircraft, they choose the train and the destinations that are well connected there benefit from that. But more broadly, you know, in every, every tourism market we've looked at, there are winners and losers. So, you know, the entire ski industry is not going to be decimated by climate change. We've done all the US Markets we've looked at. So in the New England area, high elevation Vermont in New Hampshire do fine with the snowmaking that they've got through to mid century. At least parts of the west again in Colorado benefit So there will be those who gain market share. The key point that I emphasize to those destinations or those communities and then their, their councils and others is you have to adapt just like the places that are going to lose their tourism, but for very different reasons. And in part of that is you've got to be able to maintain that, that skier experience. So it's not just having the lift capacities, it's having the, the parking, the accommodations, food and beverage, all the things that are part of it so that you can, you can absorb some of that market share that you're going to get from some of your competitors who are going to go out of business.

[00:18:36.21] 

And it's the same in the Caribbean. There are countries like St. Lucia that are below south of the hurricane belt, so their insurability is not going to change. Whereas the Jamaica's, the Bahamas of the world, Dominican Republic, insurability is going to be a big problem. There's there it all. Well, it already is. And so there are, but there are other countries and off the coast of Africa there are some small islands and others who are outside those hurricane belts. Some of them have better water supplies, so they are much more climate resilient and they can make that business proposition to investors in the decades ahead.

[00:19:13.23] 

So looking 10, 20, 30 years, those are the potentially the new, the new vacation hotspots? 

[00:19:19.24] 

Certainly, you know, I think you don't even have to wait that long. And the reason I say that I've had institutional investors, pension funds, even high net worth individuals coming to me already asking about decisions about where would I invest in that real estate, what ski area, what ski town should I invest in, which ski area should we buy up? So, and if they're asking me those questions already, you know, there's a whole lot of, a lot more conversations going on behind closed doors. So the financial community is well aware of some of these risks and are starting to price that in or build that into their investment strategies of where are they going to put that infrastructure and then by that definition, where are we going to try to move tourists to over time. So I don't think we'll have to even wait that long. It's already in motion.

[00:20:13.07] 

We're almost out of time. But I want to bring up this notion first of last chance tourism, which as I understand it is tourism that's basically driven by the threat of climate change or the promise, the premise that climate change is going to devastate or eradicate some places. Basically people want to go to this location before it is unvisitable. I think the Great Barrier Reef is a classic example. Is this also a phenomenon that you're seeing places that might be in the short term at least benefiting from quote unquote?

[00:20:45.02] 

Yeah, yeah. Some people are definitely arguing that. I'm not a fan of last chance tourism as a term. And the reason I say that is it's, it's rarely last chance for whatever that you're going to see. So we did a study in on polar bear tourism in part of Canada. And yes, the, the projections are in, at least in that part of Hudson Bay, you aren't going to have a healthy polar bear population in probably 20 years.

[00:21:11.02] 

And this is. Sorry, this is people traveling to, to see polar bears in the wild. Right. And the notion is that the polar bears, because of climate change, will no longer be in this area?

[00:21:19.18] 

In that particular region, but you'll be able to see them elsewhere. And same with, you know, parts of the Great Barrier Reef. Absolute. Well, and we're seeing that record bleaching this year, so you wouldn't go to that. Although some people do specifically go, almost like storm chasers. They go to see. And we saw that after Yellowstone had massive fires back in the 90s, people wanted to see the destruction, but also nature recovering in that case. And so. And there are people that chase storms. They. That's part of a tourism thing. So there are people that want to see that. But yeah, I mean, when we looked at the polar bear tourism, you know, I think something like a third to a half of the people said, yeah, I wanted to see this before they're gone. Not connecting the dots as to their emissions to get to this location.

[00:22:08.18] 

Yeah, they're helping to push the process

[00:22:11.08] 

along and maybe that investment could have been better. But people that want to see Antarctica and things like that, there is definitely that, but usually there is, you know, another way to see whatever that phenomenon, that landscape, that, that biodiversity, that species, you'll still be able to see it somewhere else in the world, just not necessarily in that destination. By the time, you know, all the polar bears are, are potentially gone, or we have, you know, severe degradation of coral reefs around the world. The world's in a whole different place with a whole lot of other problems going on. The lack of a tourism opportunity is not going to be what people are really concerned if we ever hopefully never see that in that world, but if we did, we'd have a lot bigger problems to worry about.

[00:23:02.02] 

We should probably wrap things up there, unfortunately, because this was a super interesting conversation. But yeah, I really enjoyed this. Daniel. Thank you so much for your time. You've given me a lot to think about and this has been fun. Thank you so much.

[00:23:13.10] 

Great. Awesome for having me. Thanks so much.

[00:23:16.03] 

Dr. Daniel Scott is a Professor and Research Chair in the Department of Geography and Environmental Management at the University of Waterloo and an International Research Fellow at the School of Hospitality and Tourism at the University of Surrey. He's worked on projects for the un, the World bank, and other international organizations, and was a contributor to several assessments from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That phrase always trips me up. Also known as the IPCC. Thank you as always for tuning in to Changing Climate, Changing Migration. Subscribe to the podcast to make sure you catch all our new episodes the moment they're released. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcast. Every single episode of this and other MPI podcasts is available online at migrationpolicy.org/podcasts. While you're on our site, subscribe to their free twice a month Migration Information Source newsletter, which offers accessible analysis and useful data on migration and mobility worldwide. Stay on top of MPI's activity by following us on social media. You can find us on all the major platforms. Forms. This episode of the podcast was produced by Daniella Espacio with assistance from Elizabeth Navarro and Lisa Dixon and editorial oversight from Michelle Mittelstadt.

[00:24:42.18] 

Our theme music is Touch by Patrick Patrikios. My name is Julian Hattem. Thank you for listening.