Climate change will alter world travel patterns*

By Laura MacInnis
Reuters
Tuesday, October 2, 2007; 8:39 AM

DAVOS, Switzerland (Reuters) - Global warming will produce stay-at-home
tourists over the next few decades, radically altering travel patterns
and threatening jobs and businesses in tourism-dependent countries,
according to a stark assessment by U.N experts.

The U.N. Environment Program, the World Meteorological Organization and
the World Tourism Organization said concerns about weather extremes and
calls to reduce emissions-heavy air travel would make long-haul flights
less attractive.

Holiday-makers from Europe, Canada, the United States and Japan were
likely to spend more vacations in or near their home countries to take
advantage of longer summers, they said.

In a report prepared for a U.N. conference on climate change and
tourism, they projected that global warming would reduce demand for
travel between northern Europe and the Mediterranean, between North
America and the Caribbean, and between northeast Asia and southeast Asia.

"The geographic and seasonal redistribution of tourist demand may be
very large for individual destinations and countries by mid- to
late-century," the agencies said.

"This shift in travel patterns may have important implications,
including proportionally more tourism spending in temperate nations and
proportionally less spending in warmer nations now frequented by
tourists from temperate regions."

However, overall travel demand was expected to grow by between 4 and 5
percent a year, with international arrivals doubling to 1.6 billion by 2020.

In some developing and island states, tourism accounts for as much as 40
percent of national economic output.

Officials from tourism-dependent countries such as the Maldives, Fiji,
the Seychelles and Egypt told the conference that shifts in travel
choices, and ecological damage from global warming, posed serious
threats to their businesses and jobs.

"Tourism is a catalyst to the economy. If you are hitting the tourism
sector, automatically this rocks the whole economic machinery," Michael
Nalletamby of the Seychelles Tourism Board told the Davos conference.

Christopher Rodrigues, chairman of the British government agency
VisitBritain, said the sector needed to find ways to reduce the effects
of ever-increasing travel demand on the environment, which in turn
affects the industry's health.

"The biggest risk is that the success of the tourist industry becomes
its own undoing," he told the conference.