Feature
Melting away
by Dave Hansford
There’s turbulence ahead for the New Zealand tourism industry as eco-conscious visitors start counting their air miles and our carbon emissions.
Conferences, especially on drizzly Greymouth weekdays, can be pallid affairs. So when Tourism Minister Damien O’Connor invites us to imagine ourselves instead at the head of Lake Matheson, some 250km down the road, and share a vision of a crystal clear morning, we’re happy to go with him.
“That view across the lake to the Alps after a fresh dump of snow,” he says. “That’s the product that will take us into the future.”
The assembled ecotourism operators nod as one – they’re already there. O’Connor gives them more. He talks about the government’s Draft Tourism Strategy; the one that says that, on average, international visitor numbers are expected to climb, by four percent a year for the next seven years, to a total of 3.5 million in 2015. He talks about $12 billion returns.
Applause drowns out the rattle of rain on the roof.
What they – and O’Connor – might be less keen to hear is that Brett Mullan of the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) has been doing a few sums of his own on his supercomputer in Wellington, taking New Zealand’s future temperature. And going by the bands of bright red on his screen, the Alps are in for a bout of fever; a potential six-degree temperature increase.
“This is because you’re losing permanent snow cover in the Alps,” explains Mullan. “The moment you lose snow cover, you get exposed rock, so the ground can warm up a lot more.”
O’Connor’s “product” is about to shed a bit of eye candy.
Gottlieb Braun-Elwert and his wife Anne came to Tekapo in the 80s to start a ski touring business, Alpine Recreation. “In 1986, we had a fantastic season,” he says. “We built a little hut and we had a full season – a quarter of the year ski touring non-stop.”
The next year was the first Braun-Elwert remembers without snow, but it wasn’t the last. Now, his business is literally melting away.
“Ski touring was our main business. Over the last few years it has fallen to five percent, and now I have nothing. It fills me with a lot of sadness to see that gone.”
But brand erosion is just one of the problems facing New Zealand tourism. Last week, activists calling themselves the Camp for Climate Change occupied London’s Heathrow Airport, protesting its expansion plans and aviation in general. The camp finally lent tangible form to fears that carbon-conscious Europeans had started demonising air travel.
Already, to the horror of marketers here, the words “pariah” and “New Zealand” have shared sentences in magazines such as Germany’s Der Spiegel. At the world’s biggest tourism expo in Berlin earlier this year, insiders dubbed New Zealand and Australian displays “the halls of the Devil”.
Tourism players here remain upbeat – at least publicly. They point out that aviation contributes just two percent of global greenhouse gases but tend to leave out these qualifiers: aviation is the fastest-growing source of emissions; and gases deposited straight into the high atmosphere are three times more harmful than they are at ground level.
And they rarely talk about jet contrails – the vapour clouds they leave in their wake, trapping more heat beneath. The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change warned that this side effect alone could push aviation emissions to five percent of global emissions by 2050.
But talk to some people at this conference, and you get the impression that we can fix climate change like we fixed New Zealand’s environment – with smarter marketing.
“We have to make the product so compelling that people will travel from anywhere in the world,” says O’Connor. “We have to keep travel impacts in context.”
He says it’s a case of reminding prospective travellers of “the reality that air travel emissions equate to only two percent of total emissions. So our efforts … are not going to address climate change issues.”
Yes, but international eco-travellers are smarter than that, says Ross Dowling, a professor of tourism at Western Australia’s Edith Cowan University. They’re wealthy, well-educated and discerning. They complain when there are no recycling facilities at the lodge, notice when the bus is blowing oil smoke.
“Five years ago,” says Dowling, “people would ring tourism operators and ask ‘How many tennis courts does your resort have?’ Now, they’re asking ‘Does your sewage system have tertiary treatment?’”
In 2005, German operators bailed up InterCity CEO Malcolm Johns about the company’s environmental standards. When he told them that all new coaches were built to European fuel efficiency standards they said that wasn’t enough; they wanted to hear about InterCity’s carbon neutrality programme. So Johns developed one through Landcare Research. It’ll be available to travellers in October.
Auckland business commentator Rod Oram says European companies are building “a very strong and strict new business discipline” out of climate change. “And they’re going to push those issues and disciplines right back up the supply chain, and put demands on that. We’ve got to respond, or we will lose business.”
O’Connor knows it’s getting tougher out there. “We need to acknowledge that and provide some mitigation and [carbon] offset opportunities.”
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