Climate Guides

Until now, tourism’s response to the climate crisis has prioritised the necessary technical work of measuring, reducing, adapting, and reporting. Climate Change has been treated as an operational issue to solve through tracking emissions and then upgrading infrastructure and modifying itineraries as little as possible to maintain current business patterns.

Climate Change is much more than an isolated technical challenge. It is one of the most profoundly life changing transformations humanity has ever experienced. We are living through a period of extreme instability and unpredictability, suffering its worsening consequences, feeling guilt, denial, blame and anger, clinging to hope that we can find a way through, terrified at what our failure to do so might imply. 

However, despite being an industry primarily focussed on delivering emotionally rich experiences, the industry has rarely considered how this should influence the nature of its action on climate change. The premise of Climate Guides is that increasing tourism’s focus on the many different experiences people might have related to climate change will strengthen its efforts to address the technical challenges, and support its staff, guest and community resilience and wellbeing.

As the climate crisis has worsened, and efforts to get people to act differently have increased, so too has the work of researchers studying how living through the climate crisis affects people and what actually motivates action. A growing body of research (see Annex 2) shows that experiencing the impacts of climate change profoundly impacts mental health and wellbeing. People experiencing climate-related disasters and extremes often suffer mental health issues for long afterwards. Meanwhile, research also shows that time spent in healthy nature, connecting with other people, and being able to experience and imagine alternative ways of living is central to our wellbeing and motivation. 

People aren’t inspired to act because they are given better information or lectured at, as decades of environmentalists giving people better information and lecturing them has proved. People act because the work required feels connected to what matters to them and how they see themselves. As the climate psychologist Dr Renee Lertzman writes: “what actually impedes action is internal, emotional, deeply relational to one’s sense of self and place in the world: anxiety, ambivalence, grief, complicity, the fear of losing things we love even as we know they’re contributing to harm.”

According to Lertzmann, effective collective climate action involves a shift away from the traditional activist techniques she describes as Yell, Tell, Sell. Such approaches reinforce the atomised, fractured societies we increasingly inhabit, where differences between opinions and groups feel insurmountable. 

Instead, says Lertzmann, we need to work to find common ground and shared values,  ‘hosting’ all kinds of people so they feel welcome for who they are and the issues feel relevant to what they care about. And then ‘guiding’ them supportively so they can explore how the experience of climate change relates to what they value most. As an industry whose two core skills are hosting and guiding, this reframing of climate action offers tourism a deeper, more significant role than just decarbonising our product. It gives us the chance to become Climate Guides. 

But first, we need to address how vulnerable we are. 

The Vulnerability

When glaciers melt, rivers flood or run dry, forests burn down, or storms destroy homes and hotels, the people who live, work and visit the places are often deeply affected and struggle to cope with the loss. Studies after the Valencia floods of 2024 or the Australian bushfires of 2020 show that long after the physical damage has been repaired, the psychological scars remain. And just as more people are grieving what is lost, so too growing numbers are fearful about what the next season’s heatwaves will bring, experiencing what has been termed a form of Pre-Traumatic Stress. 

These emotions are not isolated to the people living in the places hit by natural disasters. The nature of our industry's global networks and supply chains and the inevitable spread of climate change’s impacts mean ever more people in tourism will be affected either directly, or through our relationships with close colleagues, friends and contacts. We are an industry that has long relied on providing a benign climate and welcome for our guests, now forced to navigate increasingly turbulent times. 

This aspect of our climate response remains mostly unexplored, meaning most of us are unprepared. Our Climate Action Plans address the technical challenges of how to measure and reduce emissions, but not how to cope with the emotional cost of living through the climate emergency, how to support our colleagues who are dealing with heat extremes or disaster, or even how best to motivate our staff and suppliers used to working on developing holiday experiences and now tasked to engage in measuring and reducing emissions.

If you speak with people working daily on sustainability in tourism, people who spend time learning the full gravity of the situation, or who wrestle with the impossibility of delivering the emission reductions while continuing with international tourism as we know it, the recurrent emotions you’ll encounter are exhaustion and overwhelm. The more we ignore this and keep on prioritising technical solutions without deeper emotional engagement, the more we are weakening our continued potential to act. For the wellbeing of our staff and suppliers, and to support their ability to continue working on the technical and societal challenges of climate change, we need to pay urgent attention to the growing psychological cost.

The Opportunity

Our industry is uniquely structured to impact how people experience the world, and to enrich how we share it with one another. Our hospitality offers welcome, sanctuary and rest. Our trips deliver inspiration, reconnection and understanding. In a world of increasing atomisation, loneliness, disconnect from nature and mental health issues, tourism’s role to connect people to each other and with nature, and show them the possibilities of a better life has never mattered more.

Across the world, guides bring guests into close contact with nature, sharing moments of awe that remind us of our place on the earth. This connects tourism to the work of ecopsychology and outdoor therapy, where there is a growing body of research into the impact of awe-inducing experiences - the sort of experiences in which tourism specialises. The research finds that awe reduces stress, improves mental health and wellbeing, and promotes an increased willingness to engage in positive environmental action, especially when the experience is shared with others. Indeed Thomas Doherty, founding editor of the academic journal Ecopsychology and author of Surviving Climate Anxiety, is also a former kayak guide who continues to support patients through outdoor and walking therapy

Following the devastating California  Camp Fire of 2018, which destroyed most of the town of Paradise and killed 85 people, California State University Chico Ecological Reserves trained and certified 15 local mental health providers, outdoor educators, and community leaders to become Forest Therapy Guides, certified by the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy (ANFT) and now employed by Paradise Recreation & Park District to provide professionally guided therapeutic nature immersions to students, staff, faculty, and members of the general public.

We also have decades of experience guiding people through encounters with the most devastating aspects of humanity’s legacy, from concentration camp visits led by survivors and descendants, reconciliation tours bringing together communities riven by conflict, or museums bearing witness to apartheid, colonialism and slavery.

We know how to share difficult stories. We know how to bring different groups together to bear witness and find connection. No other industry can repurpose its core offering like this. We can help everyone walk through not only the ruins of the past, but the challenges of the present and future. 

This reimagining is becoming more urgent as the world rapidly changes. Tourism’s growth was built on the assumption of stable climates and stable communities. But the world is not likely to return to stability for a long time. We need therefore to design a future tourism that is responsive to uncertainty, conflict and instability. 

This is also possible. There are companies like Mejdi Tours - who run tours through conflict regions such as Israel and Palestine with guides from each side of the conflict sharing their stories; or Vienna’s Magdas Hotel (strapline: ‘Stay Open Minded’) where the staff are refugees, and the diversity of their experiences and deep lived appreciation of real hospitality underpins the hotel’s character. 

How can we learn from all these different experiences to better prepare our industry for the coming decades? How might we bring people from different backgrounds together on shared experiences that unpick polarisation, remind of shared values, and rekindle our love for the world through moments of awe and understanding? How can we help people experience the emerging realities with compassion? How can deepening our attention to climate change’s effects on our mental health deepen our solidarity with communities most affected by climate change? How can we help people experience alternatives that imagine futures marked by meaning and hope? How can we guide them into encounters that enable them to process their emotions and carry on?

The Response

In southern France where I live, the local destination newsletter now shares a monthly story of how they are regenerating after the worst fire in living memory destroyed 18,000 hectares of vineyard, forests and homes. They report on the work to create new hiking routes, the regrowing of vines, and the support for local villagers. In the Scilly isles where I have holidayed for each of the last 18 years, they now take guests on weekly walks through the forest where hundreds of ancient trees lie broken after the ravages of storm Goretti. All across the world, tourism is being forced to adapt, and lessons like these are being learned and shared with guests. But it is happening without any guidance, training or understanding of how best I can be done. 

Every destination manager who lives through an extreme heatwave or drought worries about the next one, and what they should do to cope. Every hotelier who replaces ancient trees with saplings after storms and winds remembers the view they’ve lost, and imagines what they should grow now. Every tour operator that redesigns a route after a wildfire or flood knows people who live where they went before, the memories they hold onto, and what it takes them to carry on. 

Their experiences should guide how we develop our industry’s climate action, and give us the inspiration and purpose to act. It is our ability to imagine and share new futures that makes it possible to keep going. We can deepen the stories we tell, enrich the experiences we design, and give meaning to what we choose to measure. 

To do this we need to start to collect the experiences of those already responding to climate extremes, learn from them, build on their lessons, and support those who will experience them next. Climate Guides will bring together this growing body of knowledge and experience to help the rest of our industry and our guests. It will share the stories, offer the insights, and provide the tools necessary to repurpose our unique role as hosts and guides to help everyone navigate the years ahead together. 

I believe the Climate Guides can be developed into a collective climate action initiative delivered by the tourism industry. After seven years developing first Tourism Declares and Climate Emergency and then the Glasgow Declaration Initiative, I’ve seen the potential. Many criticise the initiatives because only a few hundred companies have published plans, out of the hundreds of thousands across the world yet to act. Having read and analysed all these plans, I see it differently.  

Thanks to the combined content of several hundred Climate Action Plans, and the lessons learned and shared by the people behind them, the industry now has a vast and ever growing collective resource. Their insights have enabled the development of toolkits, blueprints, case studies grounded in their experiences and adapted to support others. When others start their journey into climate action, there are now paths to follow.