Submission on the Draft Tourism Environment Action Plan

^{Wai-o-Tapu, David Smith, Flickr}

Many of the most challenging environmental issues associated with New Zealand’s pre-pandemic tourism offering remain unresolved.

Little progress has been made on how to reduce the carbon footprint of flying tourists to and from New Zealand. The environmental and biosecurity risks associated with cruise ships have yet to be systematically evaluated. There is also little consensus about how to ensure visitation remains within the carrying capacity of our most popular natural attractions. 

The Tourism Environment Action Plan offers an opportunity to tackle these and other environmental issues. It represents the most recent in a series of thinkpieces looking at how New Zealand’s tourism industry could be reshaped in the wake of Covid-19.

We should be in no doubt that reducing tourism’s environmental footprint will involve sometimes difficult trade-offs. The role of the Tourism Environment Leadership Group is not to steer away from those, but rather to collate the evidence and options in a way that helps decision makers decide how to proceed.

High-level aspirational statements and strategies tend to become a substitute for more serious conversations about the various trade-offs associated with tourism. This submission proposes that the leadership group park the aspirational language, and become much more forensic about the issues it thinks should be prioritised and more specific about where it thinks the solutions lie.

If we are serious about fundamental change, it is important that we do not keep on avoiding difficult conversations about some of the pressures that manifestly undermine claims about sustainability.