EXPERT REACTION: Top Aussie tourism spots could be under threat from climate change

The Climate Council’s latest report is on the money.

Tourism is our second biggest export industry and employs 15 Australians for every coal job, many in our regional areas that are crying out for job security.

Tourism is under threat from climate change – so it needs protecting, and that means putting an immediate halt to polices that worsen climate change.

International visitors seek Australia’s unique environment, our biodiversity, our ecosystems and our climate. Who will travel to Australia to see a bleached reef, beaches without sand, animals that no longer exist, burned landscapes or risk death in extreme heat?

Australia’s tropical coast has been a tourist mecca, but our research shows warming is stronger along the coasts than inland regions. Currently, exercise for more than 15 minutes an hour escalates heat health risks, and Australians overestimate their capacity to cope with the heat by up to 10°C.

Tourists are even less prepared. Tourists succumbing to heat is bad for business.

The extra heat from global warming will further reduce the tourist season and make some enterprises unviable. Protecting the tourism industry protects jobs and protects Australia’s economic wellbeing.

The current government's priority focus on coal industry protection and company tax cuts is way off the mark and represents a flagrant disregard for the needs of all Australians.

This is an important report – continuing what many have understood for decades.

Human-induced climate change is serious and has been going on for decades. The well-understood trajectory of damage to the environment and biodiversity impacts greatly all sectors of society.
 
The toxic failure of Australian federal politics to engage seriously with either mitigation or climate-change adaptation maintains a dispute-driven culture. Thus, there remains a focus on denial and the regular shooting of messengers. This is to the detriment of our natural heritage. Australia could learn much from the current political leadership shown in New Zealand (and South Australia).
 
We must acknowledge the great changes (some beyond recognition) already occurring in our natural icons. But, we also recognise that these icons – though damaged – will nonetheless remain extraordinarily important for both biodiversity and people.
 
We must continue to cherish our treasures – even as they are diminished. We must focus efforts on climate adaptation to a very different world. At the same time, we must applaud the efforts made to reduce emissions wherever they are occurring. This is leadership society needs.

The Climate Council’s report on the damage climate change is already causing to Australia’s most popular tourist destinations highlights many harmful consequences for human health.

For instance, the health of people in Queensland’s coastal communities will suffer greatly when jobs are lost and economies are destroyed as global warming kills the Great Barrier Reef. And a similar fate will befall Australia’s ski resort communities as snowfall decreases and ski runs fail.

The report also identifies changing patterns of infectious diseases such as malaria arising from changed weather patterns in popular tourist areas.

This report provides yet further evidence of the need for Australia’s governments to wake up to the need to act now to prevent the most harmful consequences of climate change before it’s too late.

The report reminds us that tourism is a major Australian industry, employing about 5 per cent of the workforce.

Notably, tourism employs about fifteen times as many people as the coal industry. So it is just short-sighted to propose expanding the coal industry, thus accelerating climate change, when that directly threatens tourism.

While the great features such as the Great Barrier Reef deservedly get most of the attention, the more fundamental point is that overseas tourists almost always come to Australia to appreciate our natural assets: beaches and bush, rainforests and the Red Centre, Kakadu and kangaroos. All of those natural assets are now threatened by climate change.

This important report is a reminder that climate change is not just an environmental threat, but is also doing social and economic damage. A concerted and effective response is long overdue.

Australia hasn't learned much over a few centuries.

We once had the tallest tree in the world at Melbourne's doorstep. In the late 19th century we cut it down for timber.

I think the Climate Council's latest report on the effect of climate change on tourism pulls together all the main themes. It will hit that industry hard and the economic cost will be felt by Australia's GDP. The problem is that all the ripple effects are never fully captured - the cost to Australian lifestyle, amenity, health and well-being will be deeper and permanent.

The good times were wasted - we voted for leaders who failed to leverage booms in construction, mining and education to position ourselves as future-ready.

Now, even education reckons it'll need to piggy-back on tourism to stay viable against dwindling demand and escalating online delivery.

So where to if tourism fails? The buck has to stop somewhere.

Meanwhile the idea of adaptation, at least as it's interpreted, is increasingly farcical - more energy will be needed to adapt and this will simply pump more emissions into the existing problem.

More heat, no problem! Pump up the air con! Less snow; we'll make it! No Barrier Reef? Subcontract China to build one. No wildlife? China again! Nowhere left for kids to play? Jump on a plane and pollute Bali instead (if there's an Australian middle class left by then). Talk about runaway climate change!

If the climate doesn't do it for us, we'll do it to ourselves, blundering like zombies (thanks John Quiggan) into cyclically accelerated, behaviourally driven, runaway madness.

The world regards Australia as a largely untrammelled sanctuary continent where many unique ecosystems have been able to survive the industrial and technological ravages of the 20th and 21st centuries, reflecting in large part a strong and informed environmental ethos and regard.

It is noteworthy that Australia is blessed with 16 of our planet’s designated natural World Heritage Areas, the most of any country in the world.

The anguish for the international community at large, and for most Australians, is that many of these cherished and protected areas are at grave risk, with the Great Barrier Reef being a prime and tragically iconic example.

Climate change social science research has very clearly documented the very strong acceptance of climate change on the part of the Australian community, and, for many, the existential risk and associated grave concern that this altering global condition and risk domain poses to our country and continent, and indeed our planet.

Ironically a burgeoning ‘dark’ tourism is increasingly bringing many international tourists to these compelling, still-existing, reminders of what our world was and encompassed, and underscores just what is at stake with respect to unfolding climate change and current and wholly inadequate political and policy responses - in Australia and across the globe.