‘Ōlelo No‘eau

‘A‘ole i ke‘e kaoua‘i i ke one o Hauiki

Has not set food on the sands of Hauiki

One does not know much about a place until one has been there.

Hele pu no me ka lima

Take the hands along in going traveling

Be willing to help others when going traveling and not make a burden of yourself.

Learning Outcomes

1. Students will be able to describe the different types of impacts tourism has on global, regional and local environments.
2. Students will be able to create and evaluate potential ways to make tourism more environmentally sustainable.
3. Students will be able to understand the unique challenges to sustainable tourism in Hawaii.

Tourism and Travel

Humans migrated out of Africa about 60,000 years ago and since then have spread to every piece of habitable land on the planet. The last part of the world to be inhabited by people was Polynesia, beginning a few thousand years ago. Historically, people have traveled for many reason, including searching for new lands, trade, fleeing danger, or religious pilgrimage. People have always been on the move but our ability to move great distances relatively quickly with long distance flights, cars, and trains had changed dramatically in the last half century. In addition, the affluence of certain parts of the world have given people the time and money to travel for leisure.

Within the ability to move has also come the desire to travel and see new places. Anthropologist Dean MacCannell argues that studying tourism teaches us about modernity, as people travel to experience authentic natural and cultural experiences that are missing from their modern, urban, and industrial existence. Travel is also seen to be educational and transformative with colleges sponsoring study abroad trips as part of their curriculum and some high school students spending a year in another country. As the world becomes more globalized, it is easier for people to move from around the world and some travel is for migrants to return back to the countries of their ancestors or their hometowns.

Whatever the reason, tourism has become one of the world’s biggest industries and a significant part of the economy for many countries around the world. This is particularly true of Hawaii, where tourism is the single biggest part of our economy and continues to grow. Because of the significance of tourism in Hawaii, creating a sustainable society in Hawaii requires also developing sustainable tourism or alternative economic activities to replace tourism.

Environmental Impacts of Tourism

The primary impact of tourism is the carbon generated by moving people long distances, especially by plane. Tourism accounts for about 8% of total carbon emissions worldwide with about half of that from transportation.^[1] For most of us as individuals, flying is the single largest component of their carbon footprint, especially if we live in the US where the cost of flying is a relatively small percentage of our income. Hawaii, by virtue of its isolation in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, is a long flight from anywhere. Even Hawaii’s most optimistic plans for achieving carbon neutrality have no realistic plan of how to significantly reduce the carbon dioxide emissions from air travel or how to change our economy so we are not totally dependent on 10 million of visitors arriving via plane every year.

When tourists arrive in Hawaii, they want to see things and travel around the islands. In Hawaii, rental cars are the primary mode of transportation for most tourists, increasing traffic and causing pollution. Reducing the carbon footprint of these activities requires changing how we move and developing infrastructure for mass transit and electric cars. A bus system that could take tourists to key sites could easily and cheaply would dramatically reduce their impact on the islands, especially because tourists often stay in resort areas and then visit the same handful of locations. This could also reduce the need for parking which frees up space for other things.

Another impact of tourism is the impact of tourism infrastructure. Building hotels, vacation homes, tourist attractions, swimming pools, and golf courses require land, water, and materials that are extracted from the environment. Once built, hotels consume energy and clean water, often disproportionately. The building industry is one of the largest consumers of resources and how we build can have a significant impact on our relationship with the planet. About 40% of global emissions come from buildings, with 28% of that from the operations and the remaining 11% from the materials used.^[2]

Hotels, like other buildings, can be designed to consume less energy and water, use less materials, and be more sustainable. Programs like LEED, Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, certify buildings that are designed or retrofitted to reduce energy and water consumption, reduce waste, improve indoor air quality, encourage environmentally responsible behavior, and reduce the consumption of resources. Some of these might include passive heating and cooling systems to reduce the need for energy or renewable energy generation through solar panels. Other buildings might include recycled or re-used materials in construction, designs to minimize run-off and water pollution, or low VOC paints. One proposal for reducing the cooling costs of Honolulu hotels is to get ice cold water from the deep channels of Oahu to cool the buildings, instead of relying on the traditional chemical and energy intensive air conditioning systems. There are hundreds of building practices that can improve the sustainability of buildings.

Tourists use the same building design and transportation networks as the rest of society and our tourism is unsustainable because the larger society is unsustainable. The systems we have in place to move people, house them, and feed them are destroying the planet. Tourism, however, could be a place to educate and transform people. During vacations people are often more receptive to trying new experiences and ideas. For example, if all rental cars were electric, that could give visitors the opportunity to experience driving an electric car and expand their adoption nationwide.

Tourism, because people often travel to see nature, also impacts the natural world like beaches, reefs, animals, and trails. Activities like looking at the turtles, diving with the sharks, whale watching, swimming with dolphins or manta rays can teach people about important species and inspire them to learn about and protect the environment. These activities can also threaten and harass the animals, depending on the species and the nature of the observation. Shark diving usually involves feeding the sharks which can change their habitat and behavior and make them dependent on humans. Dolphin watching happens during the day, when the dolphins are resting and has been shown to cause them stress. When there are tour boats harassing them daily, this can be very problematic for a population. New regulations prohibit humans from coming within 50 yards of Spinner Dolphins and there is a proposal to exclude all human activity from key dolphin resting areas from 6am to 3pm daily.^[3] These kinds of regulations are necessary to protect these species.

These kinds of natural activities are growing in importance as more and more visitors are hiking, snorkeling, and seeing the turtles and fewer are visiting golf courses. Some of these increases are caused by social media, which allows for individuals to easily share their experiences with others and gives visitors more information about out of  the way places and activities. This increased impact on Hawaii’s trails is not being met by increased maintenance and development of trails and other outdoor infrastructure. One of the biggest complaints by those who live near trailheads is people parking on the streets, as most trails do not have designated parking. For the most part, the impacts are caused by lack of maintenance and planning by the state of Hawaii.

Similarly, visitors snorkeling can damage reefs if they step on them.  To remedy this, Hanauma Bay requires visitors to watch a video teaching them about how to snorkel without damaging the reef. All of these kinds of impacts are increased by the number of visitors who visit a specific location. Most of these impacts can be avoided by proper planning, management, and the organization of systems to minimize tourists’ impact on the environment. So far there has been little political will to create these management systems however that is starting to change.

Managing Tourism in Hawaii

The global coronavirus pandemic created a pause in tourism as people sheltered in place and travel restrictions prohibited people from traveling. In Hawaii this led to huge unemployment as the largest sector of the economy ground to a halt. However, despite this economic catastrophe, many locals enjoyed the reduced traffic, the empty beaches, and feeling like they had more room to breathe and enjoy Hawaii. The frustration of many residents with tourism is a relatively new phenomenon as many are starting to feel that Hawaii is managed for tourists at the expense of local residents. The Hawaii Tourism Authority, the government agency charged with promoting and managing tourism in Hawaii responded with a new Destination Management Plan, or DMAP, proposed to try and address residents’ concerns.

However, the HTA Destination Management Plan has no discussion about carrying capacity or any kind or the upper limit on the number of tourists or tourist growth. What is the upper limit of tourists who can be supported sustainably on a given island? Who should decide that and how should it be achieved? Prior to the pandemic, each year brought more tourists than the year before.^[4] The concept of a carrying capacity recognizes that there are real, tangible limits to growth, defined by available resources of land, water, and food.

Although Hawaii cannot legally limit who chooses to travel with the US, we can do this by limiting the number of hotel beds, rental cars, or flights to the state. Up to this point, there has been no serious discussion about carrying capacity and therefore the mantra has been to always grow and grow, without thinking about the limits to that growth. If we look at this graph below of visitor arrivals from 1921 to 2017, we can clearly see the constant growth. A serious discussion of carrying capacity, even without the ability to prohibit people from coming, can impact how the state chooses to issue building permits for new hotel constructions, resort development, or airport expansions.

To its credit, the Destination Management Plan clearly understands the problems. Our economy is overdependent on tourism. Tourism has real and unmitigated impacts on residents’ quality of life because of poorly managed state recreational resources, inadequate transportation infrastructure, environmental damage, and the rising cost of living. One of the more complex issues addressed in the plan is transportation. Three of the four biggest issues of traffic, overcrowding, and environmental damage are all linked to the failures of our state’s transportation infrastructure. Long standing issues like parking near trailheads or beaches like Lanikai and turtle traffic at Laniakea illustrate the failure of the responsible parties on Oahu to effectively manage the problem. The plan recommends improving public transportation, bike paths, and pedestrians. However, in another part of the document they suggest regulating tour buses and shuttles. If each tour bus reduces the need for 20 rental cars, why are we targeting them? If tour buses are simply bringing too many people to a site that can’t handle it, then we need to get back to a discussion of carrying capacity instead of regulating the tour buses.

The difficulty of the document to resolve these contradictions illustrates the challenging position they are in. The Hawaii Tourism Authority wants to continue to support, expand, and develop tourism without actually addressing issues of overall carrying capacity, setting limits to tourism or realistically addressing Hawaii’s housing crisis, increasing cost of living, and environmental degradation. These are complex issues that the HTA can’t address by itself but a first step would be a realistic analysis of the role of tourism in these problems. The largest of these contradictions is the impact of global climate change. According to the DMAP one of the threats to tourism in Hawaii is a long-term shift to lower carbon travel. If a necessary component of saving the planet we live on is a “threat” to Hawaii’s tourism industry, maybe we should rethink how we do tourism. With climate change, we all need to stop driving and flying so much. A carbon tax, a reduction of oil subsidies, or any number of developing public policies could significantly raise the price for both driving and flying and dramatically impact tourism. This is what happened to the sugar industry, federal tariffs changed and sugar production became less profitable. This is all the more reason to prepare and diversify Hawaii’s economy, develop strong public transportation networks, and local agricultural systems.

Too much of our response to the pandemic has been to try to get back to normal, how things were before the pandemic. The DMAP, although it has a number of great ideas, is an extension of this kind of thinking. The problem is that normal didn’t really work for a lot of people and it really didn’t work for the global climate. What we need is to begin to think differently and radically reimagine what tourism could look like in the future.

Developing Sustainable Tourism

Ecotourism has long been promoted as a way to create tourism that helps to valorize and protect the environment. Because many tourists are interested in visiting natural places, it makes sense to establish ways to protect and preserve natural places as part of promoting and developing tourism. Costa Rica, a small central American country, is often the poster child for ecotourism and sustainable development. They have set aside 30% of the country as protected areas and have grown back their rainforests from 30% of the country to 53% of the country in the last 50 years.^[5] This has been accomplished through a payment for environmental services program in which landowners are paid for the environmental services like clean water, scenic beauty, biodiversity and other services if they take steps to protect and enhance these services on their lands.

In addition to protected areas and reforestation, 98% of their energy comes from renewable sources which includes primarily hydropower and wind, but also geothermal, biomass, and solar. The country went almost 300 days completely on renewables and they have a plan which is being put into place to be carbon neutral by 2050. ^[6]The largest sectors of their remaining emissions come from transportation so the plan involves electric trains in the capital, electric buses throughout the country and incentives for companies which encourage employees to bike to work. All new roads must have bike lanes included as well. Costa Rica is a great example of how a country can actually achieve carbon neutrality and environmental conservation. This also illustrates how far Hawaii has to go.

A lot of the potential solutions to create sustainable tourism in Hawaii are also solutions to create a more sustainable society and improve the quality of life for residents. Quality public transportation, bike lanes, and reduced traffic benefit local residents as well as tourists. Increased number of protected areas and payment for environmental services can support local landowners and increase areas for public recreation while also promoting conservation and carbon sequestration.

A positive first step would be to invest the money into preserving and protecting the beaches and mountains, the natural spaces, that make Hawaii a place that people want to visit. The proposed budget for 2022 included almost 180 million for the State Department of Land and Natural Resources, which regulates ports, marine conservation, state parks, trails, and historic preservation, and 60 million for the Hawaiian Tourism Authority and an additional 92.5 million to repair and maintain the Convention Center.^[7] This illustrates how the state prioritizes the tourism industry over the maintenance and protection of natural areas in the state.

In order to reduce our over-dependence on tourism, Hawaii would also need to simultaneously establish alternative industries. Growing a new green economy could be a part of this if we establish farms to feed residents and visitors, locally produced renewable energy systems, recycling plants, reforestation, and conservation efforts. In order to develop these industries we need to shift state funding away from tourism industry business as usual and towards diverse kinds of businesses focused on sustainability.

Classroom Ideas and Disciplinary Adaptations

Social Sciences

Explore the psychological impact of tourism on both visitors and host communities.

Natural Sciences

Conduct research on the impacts of human interactions with wildlife as part of tourism.

Math and Business

Examine the growth of ecotourism and its impact on the tourism industry.

Art and Humanities

Explore the images and messages in tourism advertisements to Hawaii. What do these messages teach about nature?

Examine the historical development of tourism.

Supplemental Materials

Books

Becker, E. (2016). Overbooked: The exploding business of travel and tourism. Simon and Schuster.

Wood, M. E. (2017). Sustainable tourism on a finite planet: Environmental, business and policy solutions. Routledge.

Articles

Glusac, E. (2020) Move Over, Sustainable Travel. Regenerative Travel Has Arrived. – The New York Times

Films

Crowded Out: the story of overtourism.

Elterton and M. Bollinger (2016) 2.5% The Osa Peninsula

Uganda: Sustainable Tourism

Vendemmia.