Forget “Last Chance Tourism” to far-flung destinations: It’s time to cherish the natural wonders in the neighborhood
The phrase “last chance tourism” popped up in my news feed recently as I was planning a snorkeling trip to Australia’s World Heritage-listed Great Barrier Reef with my family. Last Chance Tourism — LCT — is the somewhat recent trend of travelers flocking to far-flung destinations that are disappearing due to climate change. From glaciers to rainforests, and reefs to wildlife hotspots, LCT traveler numbers are growing.
At home in Sydney, I recently saw a report detailing how fast our iconic Great Barrier Reef is bleaching. “Reef bleaching outpaces Outlook report, said the headline. It went on: “The Great Barrier Reef is now dying faster than scientists can document.” What a wake up call.
The most recent five-year reef Outlook Report outlined in no uncertain terms that we have limited time to see the world’s largest coral reef system, stretching over 2,300 kilometers (1,430 miles), alive due to the impact of intense ocean warming. Through the loading of carbon in our atmosphere we are basically cooking one of the planet’s largest and most incredible natural wonders.
“The Great Barrier Reef is now dying faster than scientists can document.” What a wake up call.
In all of the years of taking family trips to see the wonders of Australia, we have never been to the reef together and clearly time is running out. After talking to experts I know in marine and reef protection, we booked an all day trip to Opal Reef, an outer-reef area about an hour and a half boat ride from Noosa in Queensland. I had been before with my friend, author and climate activist Bill McKibben years before and knew a snorkeling company that didn’t shy away from the reality of reef bleaching. On that trip, accompanied by reef scientists, we were taken to see both healthy and bleached reef areas.
On our family trip, we were treated to a spectacular day — clear weather, beautiful, thriving reef, sea turtles, color-changing cuttlefish, tiny “Nemo” clown fish in their anemone homes. The riot of color astounds. The size of the coral and the incredible varieties of species is truly like nothing else on earth. It was just what we hoped for.
This year, experts reported that the Great Barrier Reef experienced its fifth mass bleaching event in eight years, something Professor Terry Hughes from Queensland’s James Cook University calls “alarming.” The recent Outlook Report, finalized before the most recent mass bleaching event in the southern parts of the reef, found that, “[T]he overall future outlook of the Great Barrier Reef is very poor.”
Fueled by climate change, the world’s oceans have broken temperature records every day throughout 2024, according to analysis by the BBC. Over 90% of the heat associated with human-caused global warming has gone into the oceans. The US government’s Coral Reef Watch program said the planet is on the cusp of a fourth global mass coral bleaching event impacting reefs in the Atlantic, Pacific and potentially the Indian Ocean.
The Great Barrier Reef waters were the hottest they had been in more than 400 years from January to March 2024, according to an article in Nature. The entire length of the Reef, and over 1,000 specific reefs within it, have been surveyed recently. Of these, bleaching was recorded on 74%, with half of these recording high or very high levels of coral bleaching.
The planet is on the cusp of a fourth global mass coral bleaching event impacting reefs in the Atlantic, Pacific and potentially the Indian Ocean.
“Things are now happening so fast that a five-year moving window [the Outlook Report] is too broad and the time lag is too long… in a reef that’s hit every year or every other year by these bleaching events,” Hughes said.
Meanwhile the Australian Government’s “Environment” Minister just approved three new coal mine extensions at the same time as she posted photos of herself on social media releasing cute endangered marsupials into the wild as if more coal won’t make any such rehabilitation efforts pointless.
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reports that the extra heat trapped by greenhouse gas emissions produced from the burning of coal, oil and gas is driving regional and seasonal temperature extremes, reducing snow cover and sea ice, intensifying heavy rainfall and changing habitat ranges for plants and animals — expanding some and shrinking others. “[I]t’s clear that the rate of warming over the past few decades is much faster than the average rate since the start of the 20th century.”
The resulting extreme weather impacts, like the deadly Hurricane Milton in the US (and Helene, Katrina, Ian, Daniel, Haiyan, and on, and on) and fires (across millions of hectares of Brazil, California, Australia, and Canada), are hard to consider collectively to really understand the full impact. We do know it’s getting more and more expensive. In 2022, floods, hurricanes, hailstorms, winter storms and droughts amounted to more than $100 billion in insured losses globally, with losses growing five years prior.
Climate change threatens ecosystems everywhere. You don’t have to travel to the Amazon or Antarctica to see threatened habitats.
Over the ten years with the most deadly disasters — let’s not call them “natural disasters” anymore — nine were in this decade. The year 2023 had the most billion-dollar disaster events of any year to date. If you’ve missed the video footage of meteorologists weeping as they report on the scale of Florida’s latest deadly hurricane, you’re probably living under a rock. It’s understandable that many of us are becoming last chance tourists as we wonder what of our great environmental treasures will withstand the destruction.
Of course carbon-intensive travel to far-flung locations isn’t helping our climate challenge. In 2021, the World Travel and Tourism Council said that travel accounts for approximately 8%–11% of all global greenhouse gas emissions. While we were guilty of our own LCT reef trip, albeit relatively close to home, perhaps herein lies what’s important. Climate change threatens ecosystems everywhere. You don’t have to travel to the Amazon or Antarctica to see threatened habitats. Maybe it’s time to start visiting your local forest or waterfall, the nearest place where you can still see snow or wildflowers bursting into life in the spring.
With a bit more appreciation of that, we might just break out of the business-as- usual attitude that’s producing the destruction and admit it’s time to really give up the fossil fuel habit and ramp up emissions-free alternatives. Take a walk in the woods and think about it.
Featured photo courtesy of Blair Palese
