Climate Change and Tourism - UNEP - Division of Technology ...

UNWTO, 9 July 2008
Introduction to the Technical Report
Programme (UNDP). Climate change and tourism have been also prominent at the UN Conference on
Small Islands, held in Mauritius in 2005, where UNWTO held a special event on tourism. In 2005, at
the Fourteenth Session of the Commission for Climatology, 133 the World Meteorological Organization
(WMO) established an Expert Team on Climate and Tourism with the broad mandate, to be carried out
in collaboration with the UNWTO, to advance the application of weather and climate information in
the tourism sector and understanding of the implications of climate change.
Individual tourism industry associations and businesses have also shown leadership on climate change.
Recognizing the risk climate change poses to the future of the ski industry, the National Ski Areas
Association in the USA initiated the ‘Keep Winter Cool’ Campaign in 2003, in order to raise public
awareness of the potential effects of global climate change, reduce GHG emissions of the ski industry,
and encourage others to take action to reduce their GHG emissions (including lobbying government
officials to pass climate change legislation). This campaign has now been adapted for use in Canada and
Australia. Aspen Ski Company (USA) was one of the first in the tourism sector to develop a corporate
policy on climate change and adopt legally binding greenhouse gas emission targets in 2001. For a
number of years now, the New Zealand Tourism Industry Association has promoted awareness of the
issue of climate change by offsetting the emissions from the trips made by participants to its annual
conference.
The scientific community has also responded, with multi-disciplinary contributions from tourism
studies, economics, geography and environmental management, development studies, sociology and
psychology doubling the number of scientific publications that examine the interactions of tourism
and climate change between 1996–2000 and 2001–2005. 134 This rapidly developing area of tourism
research contributed to a significant advancement of the place of tourism in the IPCC 4th Assessment
Report (AR4) relative to previous assessments. 135, 136 Tourism was discussed in two volumes of the
AR4, that of Working Group 2 (WG2), which focuses on the impacts, adaptation and vulnerability
of natural and human systems to climatic change, and, much more briefly, in the volume of Working
Group 3 (WG3), which focuses on the GHG emissions from different economic sectors and groups of
countries and possible mitigation strategies.
Box 1 Role and structure of the IPCC
The scientific community involved in understanding past-present-future climate change and its
implications for natural and human systems is increasingly large. The Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC) plays a decisive networking and synthesis role and, though in an
informal manner, in orienting future research. The IPCC was established in 1988 by the United
Nations Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organization “[…] to assess on a
comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical and socio-economic
information relevant to the understanding of the risk of human-induced climate change, its
observed and projected impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation”. As part of its mandate,
the IPCC periodically produces assessment reports which are based in the latest peer-reviewed
scientific literature, undergo extensive multiple rounds of scientific and government review, and
involve thousands of scientists and government officials world-wide. Because the conclusions are
validated both by the scientific community and by governments they are a highly authoritative,
key reference for decision-makers in the international community. The IPCC is comprised of three
Working Groups that focus on different aspects of the climate change issue, each of them with its
special relevance to tourism:
• Working Group 1 – assesses the mechanisms of the climate system and the magnitude of
climate change;
• Working Group 2 – assesses the vulnerability of socio-economic and natural systems to
climate change, negative and positive consequences of climate change, and options for
adapting to it; and,
Working Group 3
• – assesses options for limiting greenhouse gas emissions and otherwise
mitigating climate change.
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