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Tourism??is traveling outside one’s normal environment for not more than one consecutive year for leisure, recreational or business purposes. It is important for income within a country, providing jobs and it may also raise the standard of living within a country but there are few disadvantages like pollution and disruption of natural habitats which may lead to climate change affecting tourism.
Small islands which include the Caribbean, Pacific, Mediterranean islands, just to name some, are beautiful, tropical islands which attract tourist attention but due to climate change beautiful sceneries like the coral reefs and forest are being destroyed. The temperature which is rising rapidly and rainfall, causes climatic hazards such as storms, floods droughts etc. leading all to a decrease in tourism, arising difficulties for countries that mainly depends on the tourism industry.
The Caribbean made up of approximately 7,000 small islands and is the most tourist-dependent region, and one of the most vulnerable to the negative impacts of climate change. Tourism is an important economic driver within the Caribbean. It contributes to GDP, provides employment, foreign exchange and investments which is very beneficial to the Caribbean states, increasing the standards of living and aiding in the journey to becoming first world countries. The only problem we have is that we face a serious threat from rising sea levels, coral bleaching, increasingly powerful tropical hurricanes and longer periods of drought.
Tobago, known mainly for tourism which is the number one eco-tourism destination in the world, attracts visitors from around the world to its rainforests, wetlands, mangroves and coral reefs, which is the home of many different birds and fishes, faces a serious problem with climate change. According to Linda Hutchinson-Jafar, author of the Trinidad Guardian a local individual who runs her business on the Island of Tobago worries that local tourism is suffering from increasingly uncertain weather.
The reside went on by saying, “Last year’s dry season was excessively dry, and this year we’ve had excessive rain,” she says. “When people spend their money to come to the island, they’re disappointed with the erratic weather we’ve been experiencing. It’s just unpredictable. ” This shows that the rise in temperature and change in rainfall in those years caused problems for tourist because of the intense heat the rising temperature caused the coral reefs to be under stress where bleaching occurs.
Coral bleaching occurs when the temperatures in the ocean rises causing coral to lose their color as zooxanthellae are expelled from the coral tissue, sometimes leaving corals bone white. Coral reef related activities make up a big part of tobago’s income but many popular reefs in here now looks like snow making it unattractive, to my opinion, tourists would not spend their money to see such destroyed features because scuba tourism is dependent upon healthy coral reefs.
Changing rainfall patterns can cause floods and droughts both arising challenges to Caribbean farmers and agriculture both subsistence and commercial farming which is mainly practiced. This can cause food insecurity where the country may not be able to provide food for its citizens. Conclusively, small island state suffer greatly by climatic change because they depend heavily on tourism for income within their countries. Climate change arises problems degrading the environment, causing islands to appear unattractive to tourist and tourism will decrease.