Climate emergency in touristified economies: the necessary economic, ecological and social transition as the basis for an effective mitigation strategy

Abstract

Mitigation has to be central in climate action. Under this recognition, the paper discusses the urgent need to understand mitigation within the framework of a strategy oriented to restructuring the socioeconomic model inherent to industrial civilization, which intensively uses resources, materials and energy and provokes important social inequalities. The role of the tourism industry growth in deteriorating the biosphere makes interesting focusing the analysis on the need of restructuring the socioeconomic model of touristified regions as a way to solve for the ecological and social conflicts they both suffer from and impose upon the world. In this sense, and because they are a top world holiday destination, the paper presents the case of the Balearic Islands in an attempt to promote similar analyses in other tourism monoculture regions. It wants to stimulate social debate in these territories for their fight against climate change to be more coherent and hence more efficient and effective. As an urgent task for a successful mitigation, the article recommends to plan a tourism degrowth strategy searching to degrow the deterioration of the resource base to better adapt to an expected future with a lesser amount of resources and tourist flows. This will require changing the rules of the game in the global economy. Linking such a degrowth strategy to a quantitative variable measuring the environmental deterioration will make its goal more meaningful as it will provide the strategy with a sounder conceptual basis. This is expected to result in a more feasible and convincing strategy, thus helping to generate a social pressure enough to stimulate the necessary change overcoming the statu quo resistance.