Climate friendly travel NGO, SUNx proposes a new ‘Strong Climate Friendly Travel Facility’ to support tourism SMEs in the world’s poorest countries.
Background. 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 Germany, Canada and China: massive forest fires in Australia, Greece and the USA: droughts in part of Africa: Typhoons in the Pacific and the Atlantic. And as a result: growing numbers of Climate refugees around the world.
The Glasgow COP 26 in November kept Climate on the public agenda. We saw a Glasgow Tourism Declaration and SUNx unveiled a Code Red Tourism Plan for children, calling for the tourism sector to go further, faster.
The Code Red Tourism Plan calls for 50% less carbon emissions by 2030 and absolute Zero Greenhouse Gas (GHG) by 2050. Not just carbon dioxide, but also the more potent methane, sulphur and nitrous compounds. And it’s absolute zero not some vague “net,” that kicks the can down the 2050 Road.
The SUNx plan comes with a United Nations-linked Registry for Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and Climate plans for tourism companies & communities; a network of SDG17 Partners for support services; a team of trained graduate Strong Climate Champions to help navigate the new transformation terrain and a distinct Climate Friendly Travel badge for travellers.
This highly ambitious approach is based on science, weather and young climate activists’ reality checks. According to the International Energy Agency, despite the massive economic slowdown in 2019, global GHG emissions still increased some 6%.
The Paris Climate Agreement goal was to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius – we’ve already hit 1.2 degrees Celsius increase in just five years, and, at this rate, are headed towards 3o – which is inhospitable for human and animal life. And this is without any “feedback loops”, like the splitting of major Greenland or Antarctic ice sheets and associated, dramatic sea level rises or the melting of the permafrost in northern Europe and Russia with the release of large amounts of methane.
Plan for 2022 and the new Strong Climate Friendly Travel Facility. It’s imperative we continue to ring the Code Red Alarm Bell for COP 27 in Egypt in November 2022. This is a meeting in Africa where so many of the world’s Least Developed Countries (LDC’s) 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 LDCs in general, SUNx is proposing the establishment of a new Strong Climate Friendly Travel Facility. This will support tourism SMEs in the world’s poorest countries to build climate disaster resilience, while reducing their Green House Gas emissions following a Paris 1.5 scenario.
These “Base of the Economic Pyramid” states are places where tourism is a common socio-economic 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 LDC’s have some of the least spoiled, nature-based tourism opportunities.
Yet tourism also has a stark vulnerability that COVID exposed, as borders closed and lockdown decimated travel. For a sector which drives some 10% of the global economy, trade and jobs – up to 50% in many small developing states – the market dried up overnight. SMEs, who form some 80% of the tourism supply chain, were particularly badly hit. They have few resources to fall back on, and typically little or no 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 travel disruption has across national and international socio-economic structures. These realities are valid in all countries and particularly impactful in the 46 LDC’s.
The proposed new Strong Climate Friendly Travel Facility is named after 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. Maurice Strong identified LDCs wellbeing as a special component of the two Earth Summits he organized in Stockholm1972 and Rio 1992.
SUNx sees the Strong Climate Friendly Travel Facility as an innovative “mixed fund” with both financial & in-kind components, sourced from public, private sources in Tourism, Finance & Insurance communities, with 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 to complement it and demonstrate that the sector can itself prepare for a tough future in a positive way.
The aim is to launch the new Facility during COP 27, and to spend the year leading up to the COP in 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 150,000-euro 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 its Tourism Authority, as well as our academic partner the Malta 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, to take advantage of the Climate Friendly Travel Registry and the curated one-line library of good practice tools and research findings.
Furthermore, SUNx will extend the role of the Climate Friendly Travel Registry, to offer special free support for those companies and communities in the 46 LDC’s who sign up to help develop sustainability and climate resilience plans. Support is welcomed from other organizations who have signed up to the Glasgow Declaration and similar commitments.
“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 an Egypt for a “Base of the Pyramid” innovation.” Said Professor Geoffrey Lipman. President SUNx Malta
About SUNx
SUNx is an EU based, not-for-profit organisation, established as a legacy for Maurice Strong, climate and sustainability pioneer and partnered with the government of Malta. SUNx Malta created the ‘Green & Clean, Climate Friendly Travel System’ which is designed to help Travel & Tourism companies and communities transform to the new Climate Economy. The programme is based on reducing carbon, meeting Sustainable Development Goals, and matching the Paris 1.5C trajectory. It is action and education focused – supporting today’s companies and communities to deliver on their climate ambitions and encouraging tomorrow’s young leaders to prepare for rewarding careers across the travel sector. It’s co-founder and President is Professor Geoffrey Lipman.
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