For the first time, travel and tourism are on the agenda at COP29 in Azerbaijan, with a dedicated Climate Change and Tourism day on November 20. Such scrutiny is long overdue, as our addiction to travel seems as insatiable as our one for fast fashion. The escalating climate crisis and breakdown of the natural world aren’t prompting us to change our vacation habits. While COVID-19 restrictions meant that 2020 was the global tourism industry’s worst year on record, it will soon surpass pre-pandemic levels before going on a steep upward trajectory. In fact, by 2040, international travel will increase by 60%, according to research by Google and Deloitte, annual international trips will skyrocket to nearly 2.4 billion.
While this boom is excellent news for the travel and tourism sector, it’s quite the opposite for the people living in vacation destinations—or the planet. The evidence suggests that neither can support such an unprecedented spike in tourist numbers because both are already struggling. Are our travel habits just unsustainable?Over the summer of 2024, the returning hordes of tourists to popular Mediterranean vacation spots sparked mass protests, especially in Spain and Portugal. Local people took to the streets, telling tourists to ‘go home’ and even spraying them with water pistols in cities including Barcelona, Malaga, Lisbon, and the Balearic and Canary Islands.
This anti-tourism movement started before Covid-19, but the pandemic brought it to a head. While pictures of deserted tourist sites, like Venice’s St. Mark’s Square, went viral, locals gained insight into life without the usual crowds. Their mounting resistance to the subsequent tourist bounce back has galvanized municipal governments into a regulatory response – like the ban on new hotel rooms in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, or tourist rental apartments in Barcelona. In Venice, a new tourist tax trialed this year is set to double in 2025.
The key issue for many locals is property value. A sharp increase in vacation homeowners inflates the local market and prices local people out. For example, in Barcelona, Spain’s most visited city by foreign tourists, rents have increased by 68% over ten years and the cost of home buying by 38%.
Concerns about the environment are another driver of Europe’s anti-tourism movement. Massive influxes of people are too much for local infrastructure or ecosystems to bear. For instance, between January and September 2024, 9.9 million tourists visited the Canaries, while the local population is just 2.2 million. The tiny archipelago of Spanish islands can’t cope with the rising pollution and destruction of landscapes, wildlife populations and water sources. Located just off Saharan Africa, the islands also struggle with water scarcity.
The environmental impacts of mass tourism are being felt far beyond Europe. On the Indonesian island of Bali, 36,000 tons of plastic waste end up in rivers every year before flowing into the ocean, where it poisons the water and kills marine life. The island’s waste management infrastructure isn’t enough for all the tourists attracted to its Instagramable beaches. Mauritius, a honeymoon destination in the Indian Ocean and most Caribbean islands, is facing similar plastic pollution catastrophes.
The irony is that the so-called ‘development’ of beauty spots can destroy their beauty through the building of resorts, hospitality venues and leisure facilities. Machu Picchu is a stark example of how this can unfold. The tramping feet of 2,000 daily visitors erode the mountain trails leading up to Peru’s once long-lost city, causing landslides.
Unconstrained construction around the site has exacerbated local deforestation issues and created a waste management crisis, evident in the garbage piled along the Urubamba River’s banks. With tourist helicopter flights scaring away Andean Condor populations, this once sacred site is being trashed by those desperate to see it.
The popularity of cruises presents another sustainability challenge. After the setback of COVID-19, it’s now at an all-time high and destined to grow. Before the end of the decade, the annual number of passengers is expected to increase by another five million, from 34.7 to 39.7 million. This may represent less than half a percent of the global population, but the environmental impacts of their vacation choice are hugely disproportionate.
Like floating cities, modern mega-ships are powered by up to 250 tons of fossil fuels daily. Regarding regular gasoline, that would be about 80,645 gallons, more fuel than most people use in a lifetime of car driving. Even the most efficient cruise ships release more carbon emissions per kilometer than a passenger jet.
Cruise ships also release toxic air pollutants. According to one study, 218 ships operating around European coastlines emit nearly ten times more sulfur oxide – a cause of respiratory and cardiovascular problems – than all 260 million European cars combined. Waste is a problem, too, with a quarter of all ocean waste shown to come from cruise ships.
In the face of all these sustainability issues, the commercial rewards for ports are not as high as expected. Passengers eat and sleep aboard ships, so they don’t provide much custom for local hotels or restaurants. As a result, ports are increasingly refusing to let large cruise ships dock. Banned in Amsterdam and Venice, they’re also restricted to Barcelona, Palma de Mallorca, Dubrovnik in Croatia, and the Greek islands of Santorini and Mykonos.
What does all this mean for our vacations? Are there any genuinely sustainable options? With 83% of travelers maintaining that sustainable travel is important, ecotourism has been touted as the way forward. Defined as travel that minimizes its impact on the environment while supporting local communities, it covers everything from a hotel powered by renewable energy to slow travel overland by train to vacations spent volunteering on nature reserves. A flourishing market, it’s expected to reach a global net revenue of US$12,815,005 million by 2034.
A linked trend for so-called ‘authentic’ travel experiences highlights one of the fundamental issues with the ecotourism phenomenon: highlighting unspoiled places can ruin them. The growing number of travelers wanting to immerse themselves in local cultures is creating a market for experiences in unusual locations like Brazilian favela tours, homestays with Thai tribal villagers and survival skills training sessions from Tanzanian hunter-gatherers. However, the problem with going off the beaten path is creating a new path that others will follow, bringing mass tourism to pristine places.
A radical new kind of solution to this problem can be found in a 29-room inn on Fogo Island, located off Newfoundland in the wilds of north-eastern Canada. It’s the brainchild of Zita Cobb, an eighth-generation islander who watched her fishing community’s way of life be destroyed by the arrival of industrial trawlers, which decimated local fish stocks.
After a successful business career, she returned home to set up a charity, Shorefast, to showcase a new economic approach grounded in place. The inn, a community-owned asset, is central to her vision. All its revenue surpluses are invested in community educational and environmental programs that benefit the island and its people. It’s a shining example of how to make tourism truly beneficial to destinations.
The other main problem for ecotourism is measuring sustainability. At present, consumers struggle to compare the social and environmental credentials of different resorts, hotel rooms, tours and travel options due to a lack of standardized information, leading to distrust. To fill this credibility gap, a new generation of tech innovators is emerging.
Danish startup BeCause offers a digital platform for the travel and tourism sector that acts as a centralized hub for sustainability metrics as diverse as carbon emissions, energy consumption, water usage, waste production and human rights challenges. AI-driven, it streamlines the flow of information between tourism providers, distributors and certification entities – creating trustworthy sustainability data that enables reliable comparisons.
Meanwhile, Boomsmart24 is a global travel booking app that helps travelers find the most climate-friendly way to reach their destination, thanks to unique technology that analyzes the carbon emissions of available flights and trains. Norwegian climate tech startup CHOOOSE has built a platform for travel companies that want to make climate programs so customers can track their emissions. At the same time, Net0 offers businesses AI-powered carbon accounting software and decarbonization tools.
While technology offers tools to measure and mitigate the impact of travel, whether for business or leisure, it cannot address the underlying problem: an unchecked demand for exploration that often comes at the expense of the places we wish to experience. Traveling anywhere, by any means, inevitably has an environmental and social impact.
Even Costa Rica, the Central American country that pioneered ecotourism, grapples with overtourism’s toll on its rainforests and biodiversity, while local communities are resentful of land being sold to foreign investors, underscoring the need for a deeper recalibration of resources.
If we fail to rethink how we travel and address our travel addiction—prioritizing quality over quantity and sustainability over convenience—we risk eroding and destroying the natural resources and cultural treasures we cherish and undermining the concept of travel itself.
The time for urgent action is now. Finding a better way to travel isn’t just about preserving the world—it’s about redefining what it means to explore, ensuring that future generations inherit a planet worth discovering.