Modern travellers can get very romantic about the places they visit on holiday. They "love" Africa, India or whatever beautiful part of the world they travel to. But do they end up destroying what they love: by the hotels that get built to accommodate them, by the cars they drive in while they are there and by the aeroplanes they travel in to get there? Is "sustainable tourism" a contradiction in terms that allows travellers to salve their consciences? Anyone in the travel industry has to think about this as environmental issues come ever more to the fore and not only governments but now the tourists themselves are questioning what they are doing in a way that was simply not on the agenda five years ago. We are all environmentalists now.

The elephant that has now left Africa and which is well ensconced in the drawing room is, of course, global warming. It is almost certain that the brunt of the atmospheric warming we are causing by our reckless dependence on fossil fuels will be borne by some of the poorest people on earth, in the tropics and sub-tropics, in many of the places that tourists, particularly those engaging in so-called sustainable tourism, so enjoy visiting. And flying is a major contributor to this process though not perhaps the super-villain that most people think. The best estimates are that air travel contributes between 2 and 3% of anthropogenic, or man-made, carbon pollution. Its effect is rather worse than this as the hydrocarbons are burnt at a high level and so probably contribute more like 4 to 5% to the total greenhouse effect. This is bad – any release of carbon is bad – but not the real villain.

The unexpectedly huge contributor is deforestation, where there is a double-whammy at work. The first is in the fires that often rage for weeks and then smoulder for years, releasing carbon locked in trees in a one-way process. Once forests have gone they don’t tend to get replaced except by scratch agriculture which destroys the surprisingly thin topsoil in a rainforest and leaves an effective desert in its wake. As the forests are destroyed, so disappears also the engine of photosynthesis that converts carbon dioxide into oxygen. The total contribution to the build-up of carbon dioxide by deforestation is estimated to be 18% and could be up to 25%. Clearly, if you are looking at reducing carbon emissions then halting deforestation and boosting reforestation is likely to produce greater results than cutting air flights. And tourism is likely to play a major part in this.

How?
Most deforestation is the result of poverty and overpopulation. Medical advances have resulted in huge population pressures in the tropics and, in order to survive, families slash and burn to create farms for subsistence agriculture. If you can give employment to these people through tourism, then there is less need for subsistence agriculture coupled with, hopefully, rising living standards which tend to lead to a lower birth rate in a virtuous circle. As interest in our natural heritage increases, surely tourism has a vital part to play in this process? The flights are still there but particularly with contributions to offset schemes which pay for reforestation, there is a good case for looking at this sort of tourism as being part of the solution and not the problem it is often painted as being.

What about species preservation?
Any of the bigger species that tourists travel to see, elephants for instance, or the big predators such as lions, live uneasily with the humans around them. Where there are no tourists around to see them – think of parts of Africa where security issues have precluded tourists – there are very few of these animals left as they have no value and are indeed treated as pests. Their survival, in fact, could be said to depend on tourism. A good example of where this can be seen in action is in Kenya. Tourism contributed to a fund that paid local tribespeople to tolerate animals around the fringes of the national parks. With the fall-off in tourism caused by the violence that followed the elections last year there are already reports of a return to the hunting and poisoning of predators.

But, rightly, others would say that the infrastructure that is needed to accommodate tourists can ruin the environment itself with overbuilding. Mass tourism also brings with it pollution and other social ills - the Mediterranean coast of Spain or parts of Florida come to mind. Few would defend such a situation, but it doesn’t have to be like this, as the current trends in tourism show. Most countries – Spain is a good example – now agree that low-impact, relatively high-value tourism is the way to go. Tourists themselves now demand good practice, realising that five clean towels a day has a cost in environmental terms that is not worth the ephemeral pleasure of such careless profligacy. The things that travellers want to do are also changing: walking in Nepal and Northern India, for instance. And this new breed of tourism now includes partnerships with local villages, using unused housing for accommodation and local villagers as guides and this puts money into the local economy rather than going back to the shareholders of an international hotel chain. The increase in local prosperity that this brings should contribute to the virtuous circle that was referred to earlier.

I have an interest in this, self-serving perhaps, as I am in the travel business. I couldn’t and won’t claim that travel, from an environmental point of view, is the same as staying at home. But I do believe that you have to look at the whole issue and from a global point of view. Where carbon is released, for instance, is immaterial as the impact is global. What I do know is that if I halve the fuel consumption of my car (road transport is responsible for about 10% of carbon emissions) or insulate my roof and walls (energy supply and buildings are about 33%), I will achieve more, by far, than by cancelling my holiday. If I choose the right holiday, travel in the winter and don’t heat my house while I am away, it might even be carbon neutral.

Now there’s a thought.

Christopher Wilmot-Sitwell is a Director of Cazenove & Loyd, a specialist tour operator.

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