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  How can international tourism, between crisis and durability contribute to a better world ?

Mr. Francesco FRANGIALLI - Secretary general of the World Tourism Organisation (WTO), Madrid, Spain

 

Slideshow

 

Mr. Secretary of State,
Mr. Director of the Tourism Service in Switzerland,
Mr. President of the General Council,
Mr. Vice-President of the Regional Council,
Mr. Mayor of Chamonix,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

Slide 1

I am happy to be here once again, for the fourth time at these Chamonix Mont-Blanc Genève Tourism Summits, but, on this occasion, I should like to print a somewhat original character on my presentation, and to talk not only in my role as Secretary General of the World Tourism Organisation, but also in that of a simple town councillor in a district of Haute-Savoie, located in a neighbouring valley to that of Chamonix : Morzine-Avoriaz.

Slide 2

The Mayor of Morzine, who is afraid of nothing, asked me two weeks ago to draw up the groundwork for a meeting devoted to the plan for urban movement of the resort, starting from the global challenges faced by the planet, and finishing with the no doubt less insurmountable problems of local congestion and parking. “A vast problem” as General de Gaulle would have said in his time !

But leaving irony to one side, it is sometimes a good idea to open out your perspectives: “think global, act local”, as the Anglo-Saxons say – thinking on a global level so as to be able to take the right decisions as close to the grass roots as possible.

This is the fundamental point of the presentation, with a number of changes, which I propose to take up with you.

* * *

Going beyond the question of fashion, the urgent requirement is for sustainable development, and this was exactly the theme of the Johannesburg Summit, ten years after the “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro, when the famous “Agenda 21” was passed.

Slide 3

Let’s read again what the President of the Republic of France, Mr. Jacques Chirac, said on 2 September in Johannesburg :

“Ten years after Rio, we have nothing to be proud of. Putting Agenda 21 into effect is a laborious task. The awareness of our failure should lead us here, in Johannesburg, to establish a world alliance for sustainable development”.
“Our house is on fire, and we are looking the other way. Nature, mutilated, over exploited, can no longer rebuild itself, and we refuse to recognise the fact.”
“If all of humanity behaved like the countries of the North, we would need two extra planets just to meet our needs”.

Our planet is fragile, we have to look after it ; and it is that concern which is driving us to apply a strategy of “sustainable development”, as the President of France so eloquently invites us.

The concept had been defined in Rio de Janeiro as “a kind of development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. The English term “sustainable” is hard to translate into French, in that it gives at one and the same time the notion of perseverance and effort over time, and of renewal. It is a term popularised by the famous report of the Brundtland Commission in 1987 for the United Nations, entitled “Our common future”.

I quote from this report : “By its very nature, sustainable development is a process of change in which the exploitation of resources, the direction of investments, the orientation of technical development, and institutional change are all in harmony and enhance both current and future potential”.

The search for sustainability is at the crossroads of a three-way cause for concern, economic, social, and environmental: the pursuit of economic development without which nothing is possible; the search for greater social justice on a world-wide basis; the desire, in short, for the protection and renewal of natural resources which are not infinitely expansible, in a world which is experiencing a generally irreducible demographic growth.

* * *

Slide 4 & 5

To commit to sustainable development is to confront the immense challenges of poverty, water, energy, and the climate.

The first challenge : poverty and its corollaries, health and education

Two thousand eight hundred million people live on less than 2 Euros (or 2 dollars) a day, 1 thousand two hundred million barely survive on less than one Euro : and they represent 23% of the world population.

Slide 6 & 7

Meanwhile, as I underlined in my own talk in Johannesburg : “poverty cannot be analysed as simply a shortfall in revenue : it is a complex phenomenon, multidimensional, linked to factors like unemployment, sickness, illiteracy, infant mortality, and the degradation of the environment, among many other factors”.

Because this problem of delayed development is global, and not only economic: it is the same populations, in the last analysis, which suffer poverty and hunger, for whom life expectancy is shortest, who are the victims of the great epidemics, who have no access to drinking water, to education, or to health services, who are hit by pollution, and who live in a degraded environment.

24,000 persons in the world die of hunger every day and 46,000 of infectious diseases. Thirty million inhabitants of sub-Saharan Africa are bearers of the AIDS virus, and the pandemic is now spreading to huge concentrations of the poor populations of Asia.

A quarter of the population of the world has no access to education.

The objective of the international community, affirmed two years ago by the United Nations in their “Millennium Declaration”, and taken up in Johannesburg, is to reduce by half the proportion of the world population suffering from hunger and extreme poverty between now and 2015.

Slide 8

Other major challenges : the ever greater difficulty of access to water, desertification and the retreat of the primary forest

River sources, waterfalls, mountain torrents : in Morzine, just as in Chamonix, water bursts out all around. Snow fills our winters ; the snowmelt feeds our rivers and fills our springtime mountain pastures with flowers. Lower down, the springs of Évian and of Thonon collect what the Dranse and the Arve rivers have not carried off to the lake and what our soils have absorbed. In Morzine we are proposing to put a brand name soon on the quality of our local water. Another community, the prestigious resort of Mégève, is preparing to re-launch the sale of the “Eau de Mégève” upon the tables in its major restaurants and in its luxury shops; this mineral water was commercially exploited for about fifteen years at the beginning of the last century.

All over the world, three million people die every year because of the poor quality of their water. An African woman has to travel an average of 6 kilometres every day to provide her family with water. Thirty million inhabitants of Bengal fall victim to arsenic poisoning from the ground water deposits. One thousand five hundred million human beings have no access to decent drinking water ; if nothing is done, there will be five thousand million in 2025.

The objective set up in Johannesburg is to reduce by half the proportion of the population with no access to water between now and 2015.

Slide 9

With water, in Morzine, just as in Chamonix, we have our forest. It covers 23 percent of the land in our district. Just like the water which gives it life, it is a precious asset. It is the very heart of our ecosystem, over the middle levels of the mountains. In Africa, the desert is gaining ground on the regions of the Sahel, and the Sahel is gaining ground on the tropical forest areas. Throughout the world, an area of primary forest the size of a football stadium disappears every five seconds – just the time I have taken to speak this last sentence. But you still have a little left in Guyana, Mr Secretary of State !

It should be remembered that the forest constitutes what in learned language is known as a “carbon sink” : the trees absorb carbon dioxide, which otherwise would have a very long life, and they recycle the oxygen. I’ll be back to this point in a moment.

Slide 10, 11 & 12

Yet more challenges : energy and the climate

“We must provide clean energy for the 2 thousand million people who now lack it”, declared Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the United Nations this summer, “and in order to make sure this advance is not accompanied by disastrous climate change, we must improve energy efficiency, use more renewable energy, implement the Kyoto Protocol, put an end to perverse subsidies and tax incentives, and fund research on new types of clean energy and carbon sequestration”.

Access to energy is not equally distributed : on one side destitution, on the other squandering ; bringing down the first, which is thoroughly desirable, accompanied by the tragic persistence of the second, would turn the energy issue into a time bomb for the environment.

It was close to here, in Évian, as Jacques Chirac announced in Johannesburg, that France is to make a proposal to its partners in the G8 next June about technological innovation which will make cleaner energy and transport possible. I will come back to this point a little later in this presentation.

The unbridled consumption of hydrocarbon fuels and more generally of fossil energy, first and foremost in the United States, and secondly in Europe and Japan, and the emission of what are known as the six “greenhouse gases” (principally, carbon dioxide and methane) which this entails, represent, as is no longer disputed, one of the causes of climatic warming.

This is because the infra-red radiation which occurs as a result of the solar heating of the ground is partly locked into the biosphere and atmosphere by the screen formed by these gases. Emission of these gases may have natural origins (volcanic eruptions and so on) or human causes (clearance of land by burning forests, burnbeating, industrial activity, urban heating, and so on). The emissions are accompanied in some cases by the production of soot, and there is an enormous brown cloud darkening the sky over South-East Asia.

It is to this that the Kyoto Protocol, signed in 1997, is endeavouring to respond. It plans to reduce the volume of emissions of these gases on a global level by 5.2 percent in 2012 in comparison with the volume reached in 1990.

Slide 13

But the reduction will be balanced, and the European Union, for example, will have to agree on making greater than average efforts. And this is where the idea introduced this week by the constituent countries comes from, of bestowing greater efficiency and also a degree of flexibility on the system, whereby large companies who emit too high a level of gases into the atmosphere in 2008, will be allowed to purchase “pollution rights” from those who have already exceeded their pollution reduction objectives. In a way, the traditional precept of “the polluter pays” will become “the polluter purchases” !

While another agreement, the Montreal Protocol of 1987, on the prohibition of gases which contribute to the disappearance of the ozone layer, seems to be producing positive results, the Kyoto Protocol, which is still not in force, is considered to be insufficient by a number of experts who reckon that the reduction is not strict enough. On the other hand, leaving aside the opposition of the United States, which has increased its emissions by 17 since 1990, it is considered to be too brutal by large developing countries like India where emissions per inhabitant are six times lower than those of the industrialised countries, but are growing much more quickly.

Slide 14

Since time immemorial, the climate has been changing, but the direction of recent trends is clear: the phenomenon is accentuating. The last ten years have been the hottest of the 20th century. At our latitudes it is as if we were getting closer to the Mediterranean at a rate of 12 metres a day.

In the absence of any drastic reduction in the greenhouse gases, the mean temperature may increase by 1.5 to 6 degrees between 1990 and 2100, figures which are generally accepted, and were confirmed by Professor Edouard Bard in a presentation he recently made to the Collège de France.

Under these conditions, is it really the time to seek a ten-year moratorium to carry out studies, as the American Government wants, while at the same time easing the regulations protecting the forests and nature parks in the United States in order to drill new oil wells there ?

Slide 15 & 16

The consequences affect the entire planet : tropical cyclones, floods, and conversely periods of drought are multiplying: the phenomenon known as “El Niño” is repeating at ever shorter intervals; the coral is dying because the sea temperature is rising ; the ice fields of the Antarctic are breaking up ; the glaciers of the Alps are receding, and even more so those in the Andes – just take a look at the Glacier des Bossons ! – while in Africa, Kilimanjaro has already lost 80% of its snows, and is set to lose the rest by 2020 ; since 1860, the sea level has risen by about 20 centimetres, and whole archipelagos, like the Marshall Islands, or Tonga, are threatened with virtual disappearance ; a rise of just one metre would force 70 million Bangladeshis to flee from their flooded lands.

On a less dramatic note : the British press is worried about the expected yellowing of the traditional British lawn, and the sudden appearance of tropical plants in the gardens of her Gracious Majesty !

* * *

Slide 17

All that only concerns everyone else ! But for our own medium altitude skiing areas – I am not talking about the Grands Montets - the consequences on the snow cover would be direct, as has been shown in the exposition presented by Mr. Eric Martin, from the Snow Studies Centre of the Météo France, during a recent colloquium of the World Tourism Organisation in Andorra.

The five slides that follow are taken from that presentation.

Slide 18

Take a look at this graph. Our memories aren’t playing tricks when we remember with nostalgia the winters the way they used to be, with much more snow than we have today. A century’s worth of temperature measurements at Annecy shows the real discontinuity that kicks in during the second half of the 80’s.

Slide 19

Snow cover had already begun to decline back in the 60’s. Here is the situation of snow covered days measured at the Col de Porte, located in the Massif de la Chartreuse mountains at 1340 metres altitude. The reduction is slow but continuous. It is tending to accelerate.

Slide 20

The duration of snow cover in the mountain environment is destined to diminish. In our region, it is currently something over 5 months at an altitude of 1500 metres.

Slide 21

With an increase in atmospheric temperatures of only 1.8 degrees – that is to say at the bottom of the range which it is reasonable to expect – the effect would be marginal at 2,500 metres, but we would lose 40 days of snow every year at 1500 metres. This does not present a risk if the big companies like the Compagnie des Alpes were only to invest from now on at very high altitude !

Slide 22

The situation would be particularly critical at around the Christmas and Easter period, which are so crucial for our tourist economy. The conclusion is compelling : we have to prepare for the eventuality that in some winters there may be almost no snow, and to diversify our tourist activity accordingly. That is the condition for sustainability.

Slide 23

The trend has been launched... Innovations are multiplying. Here, for example, is what the recent Figaro guide to the Rhône-Alpes says : “This winter, La Plagne is implementing themed footpaths. In Les Arcs, you can learn how to recognise the tracks of the local fauna. In Courchevel, discover a cheese-maker and his cellar. On the sports front, there is just an overwhelming range to choose from. Snow golf in Megéve, climb up a frozen waterfall in the Deux-alpes (ruisseling), dog-sled trips in Avoriaz, horse-drawn skiing in Morzine (ski-joëring), Luge toboganning on a floodlit track in Courchevel, adventure-course in Morzine, “bouée sur neige” at the Ménuires, etc. Culture is also in fashion, with the Musicaval classical music festival at Val d’Isère, the “Traverser les Alpes” (Crossing the Alps) exhibition at Chamonix and the humour festivals at Villard-de-Lans and Saint-Gervais.

Slide 24

With these consequences that climatic change and warming have on our activity, we touch at the very heart of the notion of sustainable development of tourism. This is the reason why the World Tourism Organisation is organising a major conference in Tunisia next year, on the theme : “Tourism and climatic change”.

As is illustrated synthetically by the diagram we see here, the problematics of sustainable tourism rest on the interaction between three focal points : growth in the tourist volume and activity ; the benefits which arise for the host communities ; and lastly the quality of the environment of the tourist destinations and the maintenance of the bio-diversity, which are indispensable underpinnings for ecotourism products.
It is these interactions and their logic that underlie Paragraph 43 of the Action Plan adopted in Johannesburg, on the initiative of the World Tourism Organisation, and with the support of institutions such as the UNCTAD and the United Nations Programme for the Environment. Sustainable tourism and ecotourism, the value of which had already been emphasised a few months earlier at the Quebec Summit are now recognised as major instruments for rolling back poverty.

* * *

A further factor is adding to these external factors which I have just described, which relates more to the mobility of people and their propensity to ceaseless movement.

Slide 25

Arrivals of international tourists, as measured by the World Tourism Organisation, have gone from the 25 million in 1950 to nearly 700 million last year, of which 400 million were in Europe.

In spite of the economic slow-down and the crisis we have been living with since 11 September 2001, in spite of the Bali attack, and the clouds gathering over Iraq, this growth will continue – inescapably. The number of international tourists is expected to triple over the space of a single generation. The multiplication of short stays, which will continue to accompany the shrinking of the long summer holidays, will contribute to the growth in the number of trips made by car.

Slide 26

In France, between 90 and 100 million tourist arrivals are expected by the year 2020, compared with 76 million last year. To this will be added a much greater number of internal stays and trips, the greater number of these being made by road. For foreigners who come to visit us, car and coach together make up 70 percent of tourist movements and 90 percent of tripper movements.

Paris and the Île de France apart, the region where we are, the Rhône-Alpes, is that which records the greatest number of road trips.

Slide 27

By working and by keeping ourselves warm, each of us contributes to the greenhouse effect. And the same goes for when we travel. Think about that when you buy your next car ! Look at this slide : you can choose between petrol, diesel, and LPG, or yet again, between a Smart and a Ferrari !

Slide 28

Let us pay attention particularly to the fact that France has a total of 62,000 tourist coaches, and that in this mode of transport, the number of traveller-kilometres has doubled in the last twenty years. Here at home, just like everywhere else, receiving and parking coaches poses difficult questions. Like trucks, they pollute more at the bottom of the valley : we know only too much about that in the Chamonix region !

It is necessary to keep in mind the fact that in Europe, the road transport sector is responsible for the emission of nearly a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions, and that an increase in the order of 35 percent in traffic is expected over the ten-year period in progress.

The European Union and the automobile industry have reached an agreement to reduce CO2 emissions by 25 percent in new car emissions over the period 1995-2008; but, bearing in mind the expected growth in traffic, that will not suffice to prevent a significant increase in pollution.

Slide 29

Sustainable development in transport therefore requires the adoption of new technologies, the control of automobile traffic, the substitution of the private car wherever possible by public modes of transport, which are proportionately less polluting. As this image shows, Chamonix found this out, and a long time ago too ! It is now a question of using less concrete and more intelligence in transport”, writes the European Commission in its recently published “White Book”. 

* * *

Two factors are going to converge to dramatic effect in our destinations: on the one hand, the shortening of the winter season, a result of climatic change; and on the other the growth in the number of arrivals, and the multiplication of short trips, made by private car.

Their effects are additive, which is to say, more traffic on our roads, which are already close to saturation, and greater concentration of arrivals at our resorts in more and more limited periods.

As the European Commission notes in its recent “Agenda 21 for sustainable European tourism” : “transport threatens to become the principal bottleneck for the growth of tourism in Europe”.

Slide 30 & 31

Yes, that is why it really is time to seize with both hands the problem of traffic and parking, to prepare plans for urban transport as we have done in our community, and in doing this to take inspiration from foreign examples; in just this way the General Council of the Haute-Savoie has taken the initiative at exactly the right time, by organising a study trip through the neighbouring resorts in the Swiss and Austrian Alps. The moment has also come to convince our visitors to leave their cars in the car park just as much as they can, and, as a corollary, for the communities to get equipped with non-polluting means of public transport - in Morzine, our future electric shuttles which will be introduced this winter.

The constraints are evident, but the stakes are worth the trouble. “One big sacrifice is easy, but it is the continuous small sacrifices which are hard”, wrote Goethe – whom you know as a poet, but perhaps less as a transport specialist, seeing he was the Minister of road reconstruction in the Weimar Republic.

In a general fashion, in this international year of ecotourism, declared by the United Nations, let us pay attention to the quality of the environment in our villages and in our valleys : it is this which may give us a decisive advantage in the competition between tourist destinations. As the European Union proposed to us during a great Forum held last Tuesday in Brussels, let us adopt our own local Agenda 21 for sustainable tourism. Let us link together quality tourism, diversification of organised activities, and sustainable development : that is our master card.

Just as the “Agenda 21 for European Tourism” writes in elsewhere : “the management of quality (including sustainability) of destinations is the only means with which to face up to future competition on an international scale, and to preserve our destinations both intact and exceptional”.

Slide 32

That is really our mission : let us safeguard what is intact and exceptional in our mountain resorts. Let us not overexploit our forests, but let us maintain them ; let us keep watch on the quality of our water, and not relax one iota in the field of treatment ; let us introduce selective filtering of household wastes : let us avoid urban massification : let us preserve our patrimony in buildings, and let us use traditional materials to do so : wood, stone, slate, and flagstones ; let us bury our electricity lines ; let us suppress advertising and unsightly night-time neon signs ; let us widen the scope of the villages in flower programme, which is supported by the Secretariat of State for tourism.

Slide 33

Ladies and Gentlemen,

This is not an academic exercise but an effort to reposition our local problems in a wider context, and this is the very condition of efficiency.

It is certainly not at the level of our humble communities that we are going to solve the problems of our planet ; but nothing stops us from trying to settle our own problems intelligently. And then, if those of us who have the means do not set a good example, who will ?

Thank you.

 

Slideshow