Hello 2022: Hello Code Red, Climate Friendly Travel
Goodbye 2021
Despite the permanent drama of an intensifying pandemic, 2021 also underscored the magnitude of our creeping, existential global climate crisis.
Weather extremes decimated communities on all continents: Crazy floods in Europe and Canada; Massive forest fires in the US and Australia; Droughts in Africa; Typhoons in the Pacific and the Atlantic; and growing numbers of climate refugees around the world.
COP 26, in November, kept climate on the public agenda. We saw a Glasgow Tourism Declaration and at SUNx we unveiled a Code Red, Plan for our Kids, calling for our sector to go further, faster. It calls for a clear 50% less carbon emissions by 2030: and absolute Zero Greenhouse Gas (GHG) by 2050; including the more potent methane, sulphur and nitrous compounds. And it’s absolute zero not some vague “net”, kick the can down the 2050 road.
It comes with a UN-linked CFT Registry for the SDG/climate plans of tourism companies & communities; SDG 17 Partners for support services; trained graduate Strong Climate Champions to help navigate the new transformation terrain; and a distinct eco badge for travellers.
We took this high-ambition approach, not to be alarmist but based on science, weather, and young climate activists’ reality checks.
According to the IEA, global GHG emissions in 2021 increased nearly 5% over 2020. We already hit 1.2° C of our Paris target after only five years. We are headed towards 3° C at this rate, which is inhospitable for human and animal life. And this without any “feedback loops”, like splitting of major Greenland or Antarctic ice sheets and associated, dramatic sea level rises.
Hello 2022
We will continue to ring our Code Red Alarm Bell for COP 27 in Egypt in November; an African COP where so many of the world’s Least Developed Countries (LDCs) are located and where young people make up 60% of the population. To quote Greta Thunberg, “These are the ones who will have to clean up our mess”.
To help the Least Developed Countries, generally, we are proposing the establishment of a new Strong Climate Friendly Travel Facility to support tourism SMEs in the world’s poorest countries and, specifically, to help them build climate disaster resilience, while reducing their greenhouse gas emissions in a Paris 1.5 scenario.
These Base of the Pyramid States, are places where tourism is a common socioeconomic asset. And tourism is a great product. It doesn’t need export licences; the market comes to the producer; promotion is easy, especially in the Metaverse; and LDCs have some of the least spoiled, nature-based tourism opportunities.
Yet tourism also has a stark vulnerability, which COVID exposed, as borders closed and lockdowns decimated travel. For the sector that drives some 10% of the global economy, trade, and jobs — up to 50% in many states — the market dried up overnight.
SMEs, which form some 80% of the tourism supply chain, were particularly badly hit. They have few resources to fall back on nor do they have insurance cover. They have a priority need for emergency financial relief in the case of systemic natural disasters — such as health, extreme weather, biodiversity collapse etc. — because of the knock-on effect of travel disruption across national and international socioeconomic structures. These realities are valid in all countries, particularly in the 46 LDCs.
We have named the proposed Facility after our inspirational co-founder the late Maurice Strong, one of the fathers of sustainability and climate activism; as well as an early architect of the UN SDG and Paris 1.5 response system. Strong identified LDCs’ well-being as a special component of the two Earth Summits he organised; in Stockholm in 1972 and Rio in 1992.
We see the Strong CFT Facility as an innovative “mixed fund” with both financial and in-kind components, sourced from public, private sources in tourism, finance, and insurance communities, with a special focus on impact investment, government green bonds and even traveller carbon offset funding.
It’s certainly not meant to replace traditional government emergency response funding but rather complement it and demonstrate that the sector can itself prepare for a tough future in a positive way.
We propose to launch during COP 27, and to spend the year leading up to the COP building its structure with stakeholder input, and looking to gain widespread support for the initiative from inside & outside the travel & tourism world.
At SUNx Malta we will kick-start it, by offering EUR 150,000 worth of free scholarships to a graduate student from each of the 46 LDCs for our 2022 Climate Friendly Travel Diploma. We are grateful to Malta’s Ministry of Tourism and Tourism Authority, as well as our academic partner ITS (Institute of Tourism Studies) for making this possible.
The Diploma trains young graduates to become Climate Friendly Travel Activists to help build national support foundations and to take advantage of the CFT Registry for Resilience and our curated Library of good practice tools and research.
Furthermore we will extend the role of the Climate Friendly Travel Registry to offer special free support for those companies and communities in the 46 LDCs who sign up to help develop sustainability and climate resilience plans. We welcome similar support from organisations signing up to the Glasgow Declaration and similar clusters.
Finally, on reflecting on the opportunity presented by COP 27, particularly at this time of the year, it brings to mind the biblical story of Joseph who, as Advisor to the Pharaoh, proposed the storing of grain in good years to cover the years when the Nile failed to flood and there was famine across the land of Egypt. This is perhaps the first recorded example of the Precautionary Principle. And surely there is no more relevant place than a COP in Egypt, for a Base of the Pyramid innovation.
Professor Geoffrey Lipman
President SUNx Malta
glipman@thesunprogram.com
Brussels, 1st January 2022
About SUNx — Strong Universal Network
SUNx is a legacy for the late Maurice Strong, father of sustainable development. Its goal is to advance Climate Friendly Travel (CFT) ~ low carbon : SDG linked : Paris 1.5.
SUNx has a core partnership with Malta’s Ministry of Tourism & Consumer Protection and Malta Tourism Authority to advance CFT, to create a UNFCCC-linked CFT Registry and to promote CFT Education. It plans to put in place 100,000 Strong Climate Champions by 2030 across all UN States.
About the author
SUNx President Geoffrey Lipman was formerly Assistant Secretary General of the UN World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), President of the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC), and Executive Director of the International Air Transport Authority (IATA).
