Take away the tourists and they have no economy and no jobs. They’re between a rock and a hard place. The government needs to figure out a way that the locals can capture more of the value tourists bring.
That's not strictly true, and it's (stopping all tourists) not what they're advocating.
A third of their GDP comes (directly) from tourism, which suggests some room to move (downwards) on tourist quotas, while still retaining a fair amount of revenue from that sector, but without jeopardising access to scarce resources (potable water, housing, etc).
Really just a matter of stopping unscrupulous businesses from renting out common (public) resources at rock bottom prices and externalizing the costs.
Sure it would destroy the cheap end of Canary Islands tourism, but the local government should be looking out for it's citizens interests, not the interests of outsiders who want a cut-rate vacation.
“The problem isn’t the tourists,” he said. “It’s a model that was built around – and with the connivance of – a business class that doesn’t want to listen to what needs to be done, and with a political class that serves that business class instead of serving all the citizens.”
We should pay attention to the Canary Islands, the rest of the planet is the coal mine, The problem is identified as "tourism" but their relation to the global economics within a climate change context is the real story.
> 13.9 million people visited the islands
Nearly all of them flew there. A few passenger cruise ships stop by.
> a water emergency is already been declared on Tenerife
They've a housing crisis, a cost of living crisis and now 36 degrees in April after a dry winter.
Most of Tenerife is volcanic and the plant life around tourist areas is heavily irrigated. Without that it's a quite barren, unattractive environment. Without enough water for just the population, tourism is unsustainable.
> It's a model that was built around a business class that doesn't want to listen to what needs to be done, and with a political class that serves that business class instead of serving all the citizens.
So, the usual root causes, greed and short-term thinking.
Desalination is already cost-effective and can provide water for tourists if needed. They would just need to build a desalination plant in the south.
Electricity already is largely generated by wind, solar and tide.
Air transportation probably causes the biggest pollution.
Apart from that such tourism is very sustainable. It provides value to people who need to go on holidays. It doesn't matter if the food and necessities are imported because tourists would have consumed the food anyway if they had stayed at home.
While it causes unsustainable rent increases to local population, that can be managed somehow. Maybe give subsidies to them by using the profits from tourism. Tourism tax is not unusual invention in many places.
I enjoyed this line.
Yeah and I’m sure the rest is advanced industry and not at all goods and services consumed by the tourism-industry workers and their families
Nobody is arguing to take away tourism. They are arguing against it's unsustainable growth. The industry is perfectly ok in it's current state, brings in 16bn dollars a year.
Yup. The problem is the local elites and their tendency towards profit maximization at the expense of everything else.
It's a very familiar story.
Businesses and elites are playing the game according to the rules that they are given.
Maybe the rules need improving, but that is a governance problem. There are reasons why the governance is difficult (e.g. capture) but that doesn’t mean blame should be shifted.
Why? Why are we blaming the guard who is trying to stop the hoard from destroying the city rather than the hoard which is destroying the city? Companies need to behave ethically and if they dont know what is ethical I'm sure they can afford to have some philosophers on the board. And if they can't afford that, that still doesn't absolve them from their unethical behavior. I refuse to participate in this blame shifting mentality, as if companies have no other choice but to be unethical.
Fixed that for you.
From a sustainability point of view though 10,000 people concentrated in a single tourist complex is better than 100 villages with 100 people each.
It's 2.2 million local residents living a long term largely sustainable life that are being swamped by an additional non resident 13.9 million people per annum.