Tourism, Sustainability and Covid-19: between uncertainties and hopes
When the "world stopped" due to the overwhelming wave of covid-19, especially in the years 2020 and 2021, life, as it was, changed completely. In an attempt to minimize contamination, social distancing was a measure that challenged us immensely.
And when the world stopped, tourism also stopped. We postpone dreams, encounters and new experiences.
The tourism sector is a socio-economic system, heavily dependent on external factors. Thus, as a result of the pandemic, businesses have been closed and millions of jobs have been lost, causing countless losses, and in particular, the saddest of all, countless lives have been lost.
The reduction or interruption of travel caused losses in the order of US$ 4 trillion worldwide, as shown by data from 2020. The Ministry of Tourism estimated that this year, revenues from the segment had a reduction of 36.6% compared to 2019 and more than 35 thousand enterprises in the sector closed. Irreparable losses.
On the other hand, we were shaken by the images of global tourist destinations, such as Venice and Barcelona, which were able to recompose themselves. This made us think about tourism that excessively affects nature and populations. We also saw, for the first time, communities "close" their cities so that there would be no circulation of tourists and, with that, the chances of contamination would be reduced.
Faced with this critical and tense situation, researchers from the Laboratory of Tourism and Sustainability Studies (LETS) of the Center for Sustainable Development (CDS) of the University of Brasília dedicated themselves to discussions that could contribute to the understanding of the crisis and the expected recovery of the sector, always from the perspective of sustainability. We understand, at LETS, that tourism development, as it has been outlined and practiced, hurts, in many points, the objectives that should guide actions that are intended to be sustainable, ethical and solidary. The pause forced by covid-19 made us dive even deeper into discussions focused on the themes of degrowth, climate change, the use of plastics and little or not at all sustainable practices, as well as ways of life and impacts that we have caused to the planet. The Earth has been dramatically feeling the results of the imbalances we have caused to nature, forgetting that we are also animals that inhabit it.
With these concerns in mind, we opened discussions about the present and future of tourism. At some point, we knew that travel would resume, people would move around the surface, the seas or the air of the planet again. From these discussions the book germinated: Tourism, sustainability and covid-19 – between uncertainties and hopes.
We do not claim to have answers to all questions. However, we are certain that new technologies will be increasingly present in travel; that the tourist has changed and will continue to change; that inequalities must be addressed by public policies aimed at the common good; whereas socio-biodiversity must be urgently considered; and that the environmental impacts of human activities must be urgently measured and mitigated.
Covid-19 has irreversibly unsettled and shaken us, but it has also provided us with opportunities to analyze our trajectory in the tourism sector and inspire us to change our way of seeing life that, we hope, will be more ethical, more conscious, more truly human!
* Text originally published on 8/5/2022 on UnB News by the organizers of the book "Tourism, Sustainability and COVID-19: between uncertainties and hopes".
To access the book in full, free of charge, click here .