Enough talk - time for action on tourism's environmental impact, says commissioner
Thursday, 18 February 2021
Parliament’s environmental watchdog says the tourism industry has been carried and cosseted for too long, while its impact on the environment has been largely ignored. In a new report released yesterday, Simon Upton says it’s time for real action, not more marketing spin and hollow talk about “sustainability”. Mike White investigates how tourism has become a problem area, despite being a crucial part of New Zealand’s economy.
Poor Simon Upton.
Just three months after the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment released his first report into the looming calamity of tourism’s unbridled growth, New Zealand shut its borders, due to Covid-19.
Overnight, we went from 3.9 million international tourists a year to virtually zero.
Suddenly, all those dire predictions about how rocketing tourist numbers were threatening our environment seemed redundant. And suddenly the tourism industry went from potential villain to victim, in need of sympathy and support.
**READ MORE:
* Five ways tourism in New Zealand could become more sustainable
* Let tourists back, but make them pay
* Can tourism really avoid past pitfalls?
**
Upton’s December 2019 report about tourism’s effects on the environment, Pristine, popular….imperilled?, ended by calling for responses, to help him make specific recommendations about what needed to be done.
And in the wake of Covid, it might have been easy for Upton to say, okay, problems solved, crisis averted, and abandon the second part of his investigation.
But Covid will eventually end, planes will start flying, international tourists will begin arriving again, and New Zealand will remain an extremely attractive destination.
And when international tourism does resume, Upton says we can’t slide back to business as usual, with all the pressures and pinch-points we saw before Covid – tourism has to be done differently, and be much less environmentally harmful. There will have to be trade-offs between growth and nature.
So now is actually the perfect time to rethink our approach to tourism, Upton stresses. Because, unless we’re idiots, we can’t go on damaging the environment the way we have – the very environment tourists come to see.
The environment that draws millions of tourists to New Zealand is undeniably stupendous – but also a masterclass in marketing, Upton points out in some of the most unveiled passages of his latest report, Not 100% – but four steps closer to sustainable tourism.
“I have been struck in my encounters with the tourism industry, by its recourse to words, images and narratives that weave a spell.”
Upton calls tourism’s environmental effects, “these inconvenient intrusions of reality” into the picture painted by campaigns such as the long-running 100% Pure New Zealand. (Upton labels Tourism New Zealand’s review of this campaign as “one of the most self-congratulatory documents ever released by a government agency.”)
And he reinforces his position that tourism isn't benign, despite Tourism New Zealand’s former chief executive, Stephen England-Hall, claiming “much of the tourism product is simply visual consumption”.
“It’s important we don't keep on avoiding difficult conversations about some of the pressures that manifestly undermine claims about sustainability,” Upton says.
He argues tourism has escaped the scrutiny of its impacts that other industries, such as agriculture, have attracted.
Moreover, it had been heavily subsidised and promoted by taxpayers for decades, and in 2019 alone, over $200 million was spent supporting the industry, while less than $50 million went on dealing with its environmental effects.
“Tourists, and tourism businesses, should pay for the cost of the services they use and the environmental impairment they impose.”
Upton’s report makes four recommendations: a departure tax reflecting the cost of international flights’ CO2 emissions; greater involvement of communities in tourism projects; more power for the Department of Conservation to preserve natural attractions; and much tougher regulations for freedom campers.
Upton says tourism businesses operate on clear economic fundamentals of market share, jobs, profits and the like.
“And that’s great – that’s how capitalism works. But when it comes to the environment, to date it’s all been a billowing cloud of words.”
And whenever concerns were raised about tourism’s impact, Upton says “there’s a lot of talk about ‘revisioning, reimagining’. I don’t think you need to do any imagining. I think we just need to look at the facts.”
Here are some of the facts.
In 1950, New Zealand had 14,176 international tourists. In 1970, it was 154,991, and by 1990, 933,431.
A decade later, arrivals had soared to 1.6 million, and in 2019, numbers peaked at 3.9m. Projections had that figure growing to between 10m and 13m by 2050.
For perspective, in 1950 there was one overseas tourist for every 134 New Zealand citizens. By 2019, there was one visitor for every 1.3 New Zealanders. In other words, international tourists grew 100 times faster than our population.
Tourism overtook dairying as New Zealand’s biggest export earner, and contributed over 20 per cent of our foreign exchange. In the year to March 2020, it made us $42 billion. Pre-Covid, it employed nearly 230,000 people.
Almost a million tourists visited Milford Sound every year, with that number predicted to double by 2035. Supposedly, visitors are limited to 4000 a day at Milford, but in 2018 this was exceeded on 20 days, with 5771 visiting one day.
More than 1 million people visited Aoraki/Mt Cook in 2019. Visitors to Mt Aspiring’s Blue Pools rose from 3500 to 102,000 between 2016-19. More than 40,000 helicopter flights took off from Franz Josef in 2017.
The backlash against this explosion in tourist numbers soon became clear, despite tourism sector hype, and the soothing spin of successive tourism ministers.
In the last survey of New Zealanders’ attitudes to tourism, released in March 2020, 27 per cent believed international tourist numbers were too high – the most ever in the survey’s history, and up from 13 per cent in 2015.
Forty-two per cent believed tourism put too much pressure on New Zealand, but in the country’s tourism capital, Queenstown, that rose to 72 per cent.
And 54 per cent thought the predicted international visitor growth was too high – up from 30 per cent five years prior, and, again, the highest figure recorded in the survey.
Upton says pre-Covid tourist numbers at places like Milford Sound, Fox and Franz Josef glaciers, and the Tongariro Crossing simply have to be restricted.
“They’re clearly under excessive pressure, it’s clearly corroding the experience, and it’s undermining what DoC is supposed to be protecting. And we have to do something about it.”
Chris Roberts, chief executive of Tourism Industry Aotearoa, which represents 1500 tourism businesses, accepts tourism was putting pressure on the environment in some locations, but says Upton’s predictions of its future effects were overstated.
That said, Roberts supports most of Upton’s new recommendations, and says now is the right time to be discussing the issue, which would also be highlighted in the upcoming Tourism Futures Taskforce report the government commissioned last year to chart the industry’s future.
“But we’re aware some of our operators aren’t in the head space to be having the conversation right now – they’re just worried about whether they’re still going to be in business next week.”
Roberts says it’s impossible to predict what international tourist numbers might return to, but it would take a major effort by government, industry and airports to attract airlines back to New Zealand. Before Covid, there were 50 airlines coming here – now, just 10 remain.
To that end, he has reservations about Upton’s proposed departure tax, which, if set at levels it is in the UK, would add about $25 to a trip to Australia or the Pacific, or $155 for a long-haul flight to Europe.
“There’s potentially going to be other countries prepared to provide quite significant financial incentives to have airlines come back, and if we’re moving in the opposite direction, imposing an additional tax on passengers – it’s just a matter of timing when you’d do that.”
But journalist Rod Oram, who contributed to the recent book 100% Pure Future: New Zealand Tourism Renewed, says we have to take climate change’s impacts seriously.
“And tourism absolutely needs to be entirely a part of that movement and that reinvention – it can't just sit this out.
“It’s a joke that we say, ‘oh, if we charge anything like a departure tax, people will stop coming.’ They won’t, because as a percentage of the total cost of their trip, it’s very small.”
Oram says those who claim that better reflecting environmental concerns in our tourism industry is too much, too costly, too hard, need to pause for a moment.
“And just think what we’re doing to the environment and nature here, and the speed we’re degrading and depleting that. And I’d ask them to reflect, ‘Where do you go when you want to find somewhere that’s reasonably well-preserved? And don’t you want more of that? Don’t you want other people to have that experience?’ ”
Nicky Snoyink, Forest & Bird’s Canterbury/West Coast conservation manager, says New Zealand lost sight of the need to protect the environment, in a rush to make money from the tourist boom.
“We’ve ridden the wave without dealing with the consequences. And now it’s caught up with us.”
Snoyink spent 25 years in the tourism industry as a guide, but became disillusioned with how many places were being overwhelmed by tourists.
“And now we’re trying to play catchup and impose environmental regulations because everything’s in crisis.”
On Kāpiti Island, off the coast of the lower North Island, John Barrett says wherever there are people, it’s impossible to avoid environmental impact. The trick was how to minimise it.
Barrett, managing director of Kapiti Island Nature Tours, says his whānau long ago realised that trying to attract more tourists, in order to make more money, was the wrong way to operate. Sometimes, smaller is better.
But he recognises that, nationally, pre-Covid tourism numbers were threatening the environment.
“We got very, very close to killing the golden goose, in my opinion, and Covid has given us an opportunity to review and re-evaluate all that.”
Barrett says he’s been involved in discussions about tourism’s future for years.
“And there’s a lot of heat generated, but not much action – and I’d hate that to be the end result.
“But I suspect the current Government might have the balls to do it, if some hard decisions are required. Somebody has to show that rangatira, that leadership, and do these things. Democracy is great – up to a point.”
Upton says his report is deliberately “surgical”, identifying four areas that are realistic for any policy-maker or politician to consider implementing.
“It’s said, look, if you really want to make a difference, then you might have to do some things differently. Now, if you decide it’s too tough, too politically hot, or whatever, I accept that’s the world we live in. But at least you’ll know that you looked at it, and you’ll know why you rejected it.”
Of course, we’ve been down this path before.
In 1997, one of Upton’s predecessors, Morgan Williams, investigated the same issue, issued the same warnings about tourism’s environmental impact, and made the same recommendations to his parliamentary masters about limiting tourist numbers in some areas, and the importance of sustainable tourism.
These were ignored, leaving Williams mystified and frustrated, and leaving tourism numbers to explode, unchecked.
Upton says governments have dealt with tourism’s pressures largely by putting in more rubbish bins, toilets, car parks and wastewater systems. But this often had the effect of simply encouraging more tourists, and the cycle then had to begin again.
“Build a motorway and it will get clogged. Build a new Great Walk, and it will get clogged.”
He didn't want to offer incremental change in his recommendations, “just doing a bit more of the same. I wanted to come up with things that were a break”.
“And I think the minister of tourism should be given some time, and then we should be saying to him, ‘OK, come on, are there better things [to do]? If not, why don’t you do these?’ ”