How can travel remain fair, inclusive and equitable?

In my book, Future-Proofing Travel, the future of travel demand will be powered by emerging markets, especially populous countries like India, Brazil, Indonesia and South Africa. India alone is forecast to exceed 1.6 billion people by 2040 according to UN/Our World in Data, and there is already 59 countries offering visa-free travel making travel more convenient. With the income tipping point for international travel around USD10,000, future tourism demand will be fuelled by the new middle class from emerging markets.

However, the carbon budget will be exhausted by 2028 if aiming for 1.5c warming, so how to deal with ever stronger demand? It would be unfair to say that new travellers cannot travel due to the climate emergency or over-tourism constraints.

If carbon pricing and visa restrictions tighten as a policy response in the global north, the people locked out first are those in the global south who contributed least to emissions. This is exclusion.

Advanced markets may retrench and turn away from flying if imposed by government with punitive taxation so that would help with the transition required as the balance shifts to the east. Nudge measures include travel businesses’ promoting longer stays, selling off the beaten path secondary and tertiary destinations as well as providing low carbon alternatives like rail and EVs. Those alone are unlikely to move the needle without some form of policy intervention on aviation.  

The escalating effects of climate change will also further spur migration as people flee their homes due to extreme weather events where the IPCC talks about climate change reshaping human mobility. We need to build resilience into transport and urban infrastructure so that communities are prepared to welcome potentially 1.2 billion climate migrants by 2050 along with more than double, if not triple, the current 2 billion international arrivals globally.

We need to ensure that destinations remain open, without barriers to entry, punitive pricing, bans or restrictions. What we need is a shared travel and tourism system to ensure a fair transition. Moving away from the pay to play towards some kind of credit system, akin to EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) or a cap-and-trade system. This carbon credit scheme would instead be tied to individuals’ traveller behaviours so that people can only travel if they have the right to based on their carbon footprint, and equally they can pass on, or gift, credits to others to be able to travel. 

This mechanism has not been trialled yet but could work in progressive countries like Scandinavia with high levels of climate awareness, progressive governance and strong digitalisation. This could be run together with an emerging region taking a test and learn approach that others could scale.

We may get to a stage where regions like the EU restrict long haul flying, business travel and first class as a policy response within 2 decades if not sooner due to carbon targets. This was the conclusion of the Travel Forward Envision 2030 report where the report found no viable pathway to 1.5°C without limiting long-haul aviation growth. Yet without a fair system, travellers from emerging source markets will be locked out from travelling the world in the same way that the Global North has for decades, which is a form of exclusion.