Tourism and the environment

Air travel

• The United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) calculates that aviation's contribution to climate change is about 3.5 per cent. This could rise to 15 per cent by the year 2050 if no measures are taken.
  

• The total warming effect of all emissions produced by aircraft (CO 2, H 2O and NO x) is estimated to be 2-5 times greater than CO 2 alone. (IPCC)
  

• Passenger jets are overtaking cars as the primary means of tourist travel. An estimated 43 per cent of international tourists now fly to their destinations, while 42 per cent travel by road and 15 per cent use either rail or ship.
  

• Air fuel is untaxed. If air fuel were taxed at the same rate as petrol in the UK, a London-Sydney return flight would cost an extra £925. In the EU there is no VAT levied on air tickets (www.chooseclimate.org).
  

• Travelling the same distance by train produces a third of the carbon emissions of air travel.

Mountains

After beaches and coastlines, mountains are the most popular type of tourist destination, accounting for 15-20 per cent of world tourism and generating an estimated US$70-90 billion a year in tourism revenue.

• Europe's Alps are the world's most visited mountains. With 100 million 'visitor-days' a year, tourism in the Alps accounts for 7-10 per cent of all global tourism, generates US$52 billion a year and supports 250,000 jobs.
  

• 65-70 million people (25 million in Europe, 20 million in North America, 14 million in Japan) participate in winter sports such as skiing.
  

• 25 million people visit the ten most popular mountain National Parks in the US per year.
  

• 300,000 visit Machu Picchu in Peru each year, 60,000 of them hiking the Inca Trail.
  

• South Korea's 16 mountain national parks cover 4 per cent of the country and attract 30 million visitors a year.
  

• The world's first national park was a mountain one: Yellowstone in California in 1872.

• The number of trekkers visiting the Everest region of Nepal has risen from none in 1960 to 17,000 in 1996 (although the total number of visitors to Nepal has dropped from 500,000 in 2000 to 200,000 in 2003 due to security risks from Maoist insurgents). There were almost 2,000 ascents of Everest in 2003. Four out of five local households derive some income from tourism. 12 per cent of the trail network is degraded and there is an estimated 17 tonnes of rubbish per kilometre of trail. About a quarter of firewood used in the area is due to tourism - the average tourist in Nepal uses 6kg of firewood per day.
  

• In the Alps, each weekend at St Gotthard Pass in Switzerland, traffic deposits 30 tonnes of nitrogen oxides, 25 tonnes of hydrocarbons and 75kg of lead.
  

• Up to 700,000 skiers use Switzerland's mountain slopes on any one day during peak season. Key issues related to ecological damage inflicted by the ski industry include: modification of the environment including removal of forests, levelling of land and carving of pathways; and the production of fake snow, which uses up vast quantities of water and energy, and can deposit artificial additives in snow.

Large numbers of visitors can have a negative impact on wildlife. Studies in Kenya's Masai Mara National Park found that cheetahs were so disturbed by the volume of tourists that they frequently failed to mate, feed or raise their young. But factors other than tourism are greater contributors to the decline of wildlife: in particular, loss of habitat due to deforestation, logging, agriculture and urbanisation.

• Kenya's Masai Mara safari park generates over 13 to 15 per cent of Kenya's tourist revenue, 10 per cent of all its bed nights and over US$20 million in foreign exchange. But the park has not been effective in protecting wildlife. A 2001 report by Kenya's Regional Centre for Mapping of Resources for Development said wildlife in the park had declined by over 58 per cent in the past 20 years. Wildebeest numbers fell 81 per cent from 119,000 in 1977 to 22,000 in 1997. The Centre attributed this to changing land use outside the park, where grazing pasture has been turned into farmland. The park alone is too small to support its wildlife (Wildlife Dynamics: An Analysis of Changes in the Masai Mara Ecosystem in Kenya). In fact, only a quarter of the 'migratory corridors' used by wildlife in Kenya lie within national parks.
  

• In the Grand Canyon National Park, park rangers have shot wild deer because they became so used to eating junk food handed out by tourists that they lost their natural ability to digest vegetation. (Associated Press, 7/1/95)
  

• A prevalent problem is the importation of illegal wildlife souvenirs. The WWF identified a souvenir "Top 10" in a report in 2002, which included traditional Chinese medicines with ingredients such as tiger, leopard and musk deer; live reptiles; coral and elephant ivory or skin products.

Tourism, which sells luxury and indulgence, can be a profligate consumer of natural resources:

• A large hotel in Egypt uses as much electricity as 3,600 families. (UNEP)
  

• The water used by a tourist in 3.6 days could produce enough rice to feed a villager in the South for a year. (UN Food and Agriculture Organisation)
  

• A Philippines study found that a hotel guest uses as much water in 18 days as a rural family does in a year. Daily consumption per guest was 2,720 litres (including cooking, laundry, swimming pools, showers and watering lawns).
  

• A tourist in Spain uses 880 litres of water a day, compared with 250 by a local. (WWF)
  

• In 1997, along 2km of beach in Goa, India, there were 50 swimming pools within 300 metres of the sea.

Worldwide, 50 million people play golf. Each year, up to 5,000 hectares of the Earth's land surface - an area the size of Paris - is cleared for golf courses. The planet's 25,000 golf courses use large areas of land and require huge amounts of water (an 18-hole course can consume more than 2.3 million litres of water daily), fertiliser and pesticides to produce the smooth, green surfaces that golfers demand.

• A study in the Philippines found water used on the 19 golf courses it surveyed could have irrigated 1,500 smallholdings or supplied 330,000 Manila residents (Social Cost of Golf Courses, Omi Royandoyan, Philippine Peasants Institute, 1997). Another Philippines study found that the average golf course uses 24 million gallons of water per month - enough to irrigate 65 hectares of farmland or to supply a 2,000-room 4-star hotel (Philippine Human Rights Information Center, 1999).
  

• Even in Spain, a golf course in Benidorm uses as much water as 10,000 people. A typical golf course in Thailand uses 1,500kg of chemical fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides a year and as much water as 60,000 rural villagers.
  

• Chemical runoff from pesticides and fertilisers can pollute rivers and kill wildlife. Golf courses could drastically reduce their water and chemical use by accepting less green fairways, recycling water and using native and less water-hungry grasses.

This section was compiled by Mark Mann, author of The Gringo Trail and Tourism Concern's Community Tourism Guide.

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