The Marine Environment

The fact that open ocean covers two-thirds of the surface of our planet dramati- cally illustrates the importance of the marine environment to life on Earth. But the importance of the oceans goes far beyond their sheer size for it is the oceans that largely determine our climate for the weather around the world is heavily influenced by what happens in our seas. ‘Weather patterns are primarily controlled by ocean currents which are influenced by surface winds, temperature, salinity, the Earth’s rotation and ocean tides....Ocean currents bring warm water and rain from the equator to the poles and cold water from the poles towards the equator’ (www.greentumble.com, 2016). Every schoolchild knows that the sun evaporates water from the sea which then become clouds that then produces almost all of the rain and snow which falls on every land mass in the world. The oceans also absorb heat from the sun and from human activities; this heat is then carried to the land in those places where the prevailing winds blow from the sea to the land. At the same time, the oceans play a vital role in the carbon cycle by absorbing carbon dioxide that is in the air.

Postscript - The COVID-19 Pandemic

I completed the main text of this book a few days before Coronavirus, as it was called at the beginning, started to become a major story in the news in Europe. Now, just over three months later, as the book is about go for printing it seems as if the COVID-19 pandemic, as it is now called, is about the only story in the world’s media. In the circumstances, it seems important that I say something about the virus and its potential impact on the subject of this book. As I write these words, in early Ma y 2020, the pandemic has killed at least 264,000 people worldwide and some 3.8 million people are confirmed to have been infected, although the actual number is likely to be significantly higher as many people who have had the virus may not have had it confirmed through testing. To put this in context, the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918 killed an estimated 50 million people, while the highly publicised outbreak of SARS in 2003 killed fewer than 1,000 people. The 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak in Africa resulted in the deaths of an estimated 11,300 people. So COVID-19 is far and away the largest pandemic, in terms of deaths, to hit the world in just over a century. Of course, we do not yet know the final death toll from it, for as I write it is still continuing. Furthermore, unlike SARS and Ebola this virus is a true pandemic, affecting virtually every part of the planet where human beings live.

Leisure Activities in Marine Environments

In recent years we have seen a veritable ‘explosion’ in the use of the sea for a growing variety of marine leisure activities. This is now a truly global phenomenon that can be seen from Iceland to South Africa, Australia to Florida. Activities in the sea have always been part of coastal tourism, from paddling and swimming to sailing and diving to angling and boat trips. However, in the past decade or two we have seen the invention of new activities and the developments of variations on traditional marine activities. We now have coasteering, wild swimming, paddle-boarding, RIB and banana boats and sea kayaking, all giving tourists further opportunities to get pleasure from the marine environment. Many of these activities also reflect a change in marine leisure with an increase in active rather than passive activities and an increase in adventure activities. This has, inevitably, increased the risk level of sea-based leisure activities in some ways. Several of the more adventurous new activities also involve travelling further from land or to less developed areas of coast, increasing the risk further. Interestingly, it appears that many tourists become ‘hooked’ on some sea-based leisure activities once they have experienced them on vacation. From that point onwards their desire to continue to participate in an activity will often influence their choice of vacation destination. The innovative developments we have seen in terms of sea-based leisure activities have led to a huge increase in participation in marine leisure activities. This has been stimulated by, and reflected in, the investment made in equipment and infrastructure for such activities by governments, commercial operators, and hotels and resorts.

Wildlife–Watching in Marine Environments

If one looks at destination guide books from as late as the 1990s, very few would have had much to say about watching marine wildlife, except perhaps a few sentences about scuba-diving and the opportunity it gave the tourist to see interesting and beautiful fish as an added bonus for participating in this leisure activity. Otherwise, the tourist may have been recommended to visit a certain place because of the opportunities to fish for huge specimens that could be displayed as trophies and photographed to impress the folks back home. Yet, a few years later, marine wildlife-watching has become a major selling point for many coastal destinations around the world, from Australia to California, Sri Lanka to Alaska, South Africa to Scotland. Interestingly, it is also an activity, out of all of the ways in which tourism and the marine environment interacts, that has attracted perhaps the most attention by tourism researchers. In this chapter we will look at how and why this change occurred together with a look at the impacts of the rise of marine wildlife-watching in its many forms. However, first we need to be clear what we are talking about by looking at several typologies of marine wildlife-watching.

Oceans, Natural Disasters and Tourism

In recent years, the world seems to have seen increasing numbers of natural disasters, affecting coastal tourist destinations as well as places with no connection to tourism. Ritchie noted in 2008 that despite the apparent increases in natural disasters there still seemed to be a lack of research in the tourism field on the management of these disasters covering response, recovery, reduction and readiness (Ritchie, 2008). While things have improved since then there is still some truth in his contention. These natural disasters include extreme weather events such as hurricanes, storms, floods and landslides, and heatwaves as well as disasters in which the weather plays a part, such as wildfires, and disasters that are not linked to the weather at all, such as earthquakes, volcanoes, and disease outbreaks. These natural disasters not only appear to be becoming more frequent but also more severe and sometimes occurring in places which have not seen such things before, and sometimes in major coastal tourist destinations.

Key Challenges in the Planning and Management of Tourism in Marine Environments

Throughout much of this text to date I have suggested that the public sector needs to be doing more to plan and manage tourism to reduce its negative impacts on the marine environment. However, I have never said this would be easy and in the Preface, I outlined some of the complexities involved in the planning and management of tourism of the oceans, from the beaches and shoreline to the most remote areas of open sea. In this chapter we will explore some of these complexities and endeavour to look beyond them to see how we might try to develop a model of best practice for the future. Planning and management is obviously a wide field so I will be focusing upon three main areas of activity as follows: - The planning process for tourism including master planning of new resorts, zoning of land and sea for various uses and the system for evaluating and making decisions on proposed new developments. - The ways in which the operations of the tourism industry are managed by the public sector, including legislation and regulations and their enforcement as well as policies on infrastructure development and management. - Emergency planning and crisis management in the event of various kinds of natural disasters which is an important issue in relation to tourism.

The Consumption of Marine Resources by Tourists

Most of this book to up to now has focused upon tourists and tourism harming our oceans by putting undesirable things into the sea, whether that be plastics, fuel spilled from boats or even nasty chemicals from sunscreen lotions. However, in this chapter we will focus on the harm which tourists and the tourism industry do when they remove things from the sea and the ocean fringe. We will see that the consumption of marine resources by tourists and the tourism industry is adding to the problems faced by our oceans. I recognise that most of the damage being done to the marine environment from the consumption of resources in the sea and under the seabed is not due to tourism. The majority of it is due to over-fishing to meet the everyday needs and desires of the populations of towns and cities, and the exploitation of natural resources including, oil, natural gas and minerals. However, tourist consumption contributes to the problems faced by the oceans and most of this consumption is for pleasure rather than necessity. Furthermore, most of the consumption of marine resources by tourists occurs in specific locations and this concentrates its impact on particular areas of the marine environment, around coastal destinations.

Introduction All at Sea

For centuries now, the sea has been at the very heart of tourism. For hundreds of millions of people worldwide, going on vacation still means going to the coast, particularly for their annual summer break. This magnetic pull of the sea motivates millions of people every week, from Stockholm to Sydney, New York to New Delhi, to head to their favourite beaches and seaside resorts. The lure of the sea makes them willing to put up with the hassles of modern airline travel and being stuck for hours in huge traffic jams so they can spend a few days each year by the ocean. What they do when they arrive at the coast, however, varies dramatically from tourist to tourist. For some they are content just to drink in the views, take photos and sit in their car viewing the sea through their windscreens. For others it means lying on the beach soaking up the sun, people-watching or playing ball games. Some tourists come to enjoy the man-made attractions that develop wherever tourists make their annual seasonal migration to the ocean. This can mean everything from casinos to theme parks, gift shops to theatres. In these cases, the sea is simply a backdrop to the vacation, with little real interaction with it on the part of the visitor.

The Cruise Industry

In many ways the cruise industry is the success story of modern tourism. Less than 30 years ago commentators were predicting its demise after years of slow and steady decline. It had become an object of ridicule with the oft repeated joke that its customers consisted just of the ‘newly-wed, overfed, and the nearly dead’. The hit US TV show, ‘Love Boat’, set on a cruise ship, and broadcast from 1977 to 1986 seemed to mirror the decline of traditional cruising; highly popular with audiences in its early days its ratings fell and it was axed after nine years in 1986. And then, in the early 1990s, cruising went through a period of change that can only be described as revolutionary. American brands led the way in over-hauling the whole cruise experience in line with how consumer society was changing, making cruising both affordable and attractive to a wider range of demographic groups. It was no longer just for the rich and the elderly; the industry reached out to people of all ages and means. The market responded enthusiastically, and the cruise market has been growing steadily ever since. Today, cruise operators invest billions in new ships and developing new onboard experiences that will put them ahead of their competitors. Most coastal tourist destinations with any kind of port or harbour facility seek to attract as many cruise ships as possible, fully aware of the spending power of cruise passengers when they come ashore. For their part consumers are very loyal to the cruise experiences with an increasing number of people enjoying several cruises every year. There are now cruise channels on satellite and cable television and specialist cruise magazines that focus solely on cruise products and destinations. However, in the past few years, some commentators have begun to view the cruise sector through more critical eyes. Its environmental impact has not come under scrutiny until recently, as most attention has focused on the more obvious target, aviation. However, several high-profile news stories have begun to shine a spotlight on the environmental impact of cruise ships. This scrutiny is likely to intensify as more and more public and media attention is focused on the plight of our oceans and the impacts on them of global warming.

Responsible Tourism and the Cruise Industry by Harold Goodwin

The growth of the cruise industry raises significant challenges for the three pillars of the sustainability agenda: environmental, socio-cultural and economic. These problems compounded by issues of extra-territoriality and conflicts between local authorities and national governments. Venice and Barcelona suffer from overtourism, a problem exacerbated by the arrival of larger and larger cruise ships which discharge thousands of tourists daily into cities already crowded with tourists. Neither city has any control over the number of ships docking. By contrast, the Mayor of Dubrovnik was able to sign an agreement with the Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA) to cap the number of cruise ships to two per day carrying a total of 5,000 tourists.