Last chance tourism
A survey finds that visitors want to see the underwater Reef before it’s destroyed by climate change.
Australia’s tourism sector may be receiving an ironic uptick in visitors despite the deterioration of one of the continent’s main draws, the Great Barrier Reef.
That’s because people are worried that if they don’t go now, they may never see the planet’s largest living organism and the millions of corals, tropical fish, turtles, dolphins, and sharks it supports.
It’s called “last-chance tourism,” a phenomenon in which visitors explicitly seek out vanishing lands or seascapes. The fear is being driven largely by the reality of climate change. Warming ocean temperatures, coastal development, and invasive species have laid waste to roughly half the corals along the 1,200-mile-long Great Barrier Reef in the past three decades. This year, the reef experienced the worst coral bleaching ever, with one study estimating that up to 93 percent of corals were affected. Another study suggested coral bleaching episodes will only get worse.
The flurry of international media coverage on the reef’s demise got environmental researcher Annah Piggott-McKellar at the University of Queensland wondering what kind of influence those reports are having on the $5.6 billion reef-related tourism industry.
In a survey published in the Journal of Sustainable Tourism, Piggott-McKellar and fellow researchers discovered that nearly 70 percent of visitors to the Great Barrier Reef in 2015 said a desire to see the reef before it’s gone was their main reason for journeying to the World Heritage Site. [...]
Article from Take part
Australia’s tourism sector may be receiving an ironic uptick in visitors despite the deterioration of one of the continent’s main draws, the Great Barrier Reef.
That’s because people are worried that if they don’t go now, they may never see the planet’s largest living organism and the millions of corals, tropical fish, turtles, dolphins, and sharks it supports.
It’s called “last-chance tourism,” a phenomenon in which visitors explicitly seek out vanishing lands or seascapes. The fear is being driven largely by the reality of climate change. Warming ocean temperatures, coastal development, and invasive species have laid waste to roughly half the corals along the 1,200-mile-long Great Barrier Reef in the past three decades. This year, the reef experienced the worst coral bleaching ever, with one study estimating that up to 93 percent of corals were affected. Another study suggested coral bleaching episodes will only get worse.
The flurry of international media coverage on the reef’s demise got environmental researcher Annah Piggott-McKellar at the University of Queensland wondering what kind of influence those reports are having on the $5.6 billion reef-related tourism industry.
In a survey published in the Journal of Sustainable Tourism, Piggott-McKellar and fellow researchers discovered that nearly 70 percent of visitors to the Great Barrier Reef in 2015 said a desire to see the reef before it’s gone was their main reason for journeying to the World Heritage Site. [...]
Article from Take part
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