"Seeing the World - Destroying the World" by Stella R.

Studies have found tourism has a large impact on global warming and environmental problems. Recently it has been found that tourism accounts for 8% of global greenhouse gases, which does not sound like much but is 4 times more than originally thought, and has shown to be growingat 4% annually. Greenhouse gases aren’t the only environment- harming effects of tourism, as tourism hurts biodiversity and creates ozone layer depletion. One of the biggest environmental problem tourism gives us is hurting biodiversity, taking over wildlife reserves and killing species. It hurts biodiversity as hotels, restaurants and tourist attraction are built, destroying rainforests and other land areas that used to be animal and plant habitats.

So how is tourism hurting the environment so much? Tourism accounts for greenhouse gases mostly through transportation. Transportation caused 75% of tourisms greenhouse gases, with planes being the main source of that. Greenhouse gases are what causes the greenhouse effect, the greenhouse effect being “An atmospheric heating phenomenon, absorption by atmospheric carbon dioxide, water vapor, methane, and other gases; thus, the rising level of carbon dioxide is viewed with concern.” In summary, planes create CO2 (carbon dioxide) that is released into the air as they burn jet fuel. As tourists are the main group of people that fly, the tourism industry is creating an alarmingly high amount of greenhouse gases. 

Another big problem is the loss of biodiversity. Biodiversity is defined as “the variety of life in the world or in a particular habitat or ecosystem.” We lose biodiversity in tourism when buildings are built on top of forests, and animal and plant habitats are lost. By globalizing big hotel and restaurant chains, a lot of destruction of the natural environment occurs. 


So what can we do about this? First, we have to address the problem of planes, and we don’t really have a solution to that yet. An option could be more use of ships instead of planes, or just not traveling to other continents, because there are tourist options nearer to you. Other forms of transportation can be fixed to help the environment. More use of public transportation, encouraging using smart cars as rentals, making bikes more available and making tourist cities walkable would greatly decrease the number of greenhouse gases formed by cars. We also need to encourage ecotourism. An example of a place that embraced ecotourism is Costa Rica. Costa Rica has national parks as one of its main tourist attractions, with 25% of Costa Rica being protected from a future settlement, they have mostly small businesses and hotels owned by local people. By making national parks a tourist attraction, biodiversity would be helped by the protection national parks offer. More websites can also be created to show the best ecofriendly tourist options for food and lodging.

Tourism does not only have an effect on the global warming, global warming is also hurting the tourism industry. So there are clear benefits to protecting the environment in the tourism industry. Some examples of global warming hurting tourism are natural disasters. Hurricanes in Florida keep tourists from going there, too warm waters in Hawaii kill the coral and make the waters much less beautiful. In summary, the tourism industry can only gain from ecotourism.

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