E123 - Jeremy Smith from Tourism Declares a Climate Emergency

Welcome back to the Green Element Podcast, where we feature business leaders and innovators transforming their operations to be more environmentally and socially sustainable. I'm your host, Will Richardson, and I can't wait to meet our guest today and help you on your journey of sustainability. Welcome to the Green Element Podcast. Thank you so much for joining us today, Jeremy. So you're Jeremy Smith from Tourism Declares. It would be great if you could just tell us a bit about yourself and then a bit about the organization Tourism Declares, please.

Brilliant. Thank you very much, Will. It's a pleasure to be here. So I'm Jeremy Smith. As you said, I'm co-founder of Tourism Declares a Climate Emergency or Tourism Declares, as we are commonly known. My background is that I'm a writer who originally focused entirely on environmental issues from the turn of the millennium. And then from about 2007, 2008, I focused on tourism and sustainability, writing a couple of books, running a few websites, doing quite a lot of consulting. Towards the end of last year, I started having conversations with a few other people in the industry about how we could motivate and mobilize our industry around meaningful climate action. And in January this year, that led to the launch of Tourism Declares.

And do you, as an organization, do you incorporate— I mean, where do you start and stop within tourism? Because tourism is quite a big subject, isn't it?

Tourism is a very big subject. I mean, the industry likes to say that it's responsible for 1 in 10 jobs or supports 1 in 10 jobs and supports 10% of GDP. And those figures are challengeable, shall we say, but it's certainly an industry of enormous scale. We now have 135, we'll talk in more detail about what this means, but we now have 135 members of our community of people or organizations who declared, which range from an individual like myself or a couple of bloggers who have declared, and so one person, up to VisitScotland, a national tourism organisation that was our first national tourism organisation to declare when they declared last week. We have one airline, some hotels, several tour operators, travel agents, people working in consulting, in education, in finance. So it stops where tourism stops.

Okay, so there is no definitive border or barrier kind of?

No, I think the thing that is most, I think, is fairly unique about tourism or fairly specific, let's say, about tourism is its complexity and its spread and that it does touch so many different things. And that whereas if you talk to someone who works for a mining company, and I apologize to those people who work for mining companies who say I got this wrong, but one mining company and another mining company, they might mine a different mineral and use a different set of processes, but they're mining companies. But someone who works for a hotel, their day job is entirely different from someone who manages a fleet of vehicles or someone who's a tour operator or someone who works at an airport. So it's almost like loads of micro industries inside of one industry that collaborates. And I think the fact that it's an industry based around connection and community and movement by its very nature means that we will connect an awful lot of different things.

And what would you say your purpose was as an organization?

Depends on where you want to look at it, but our mission statement is that we want to encourage everyone working in tourism to declare a climate emergency and enable them all to publish a climate action plan. The sort of back— the purpose behind that is that I, we have grown frustrated by the complexity, the variety of different interpretations on what we should be doing about climate action, and whether we should be chasing carbon neutral by 2050, net zero by 2050, offsetting 30% of our emissions, chasing climate positive, etc., etc. manner of different ways of doing things at different speeds, and so on. And this creates an enormous level of confusion, which then translates into your holidaymaker who wants to have a holiday and would like to do it in a way that was sustainable, had a light footprint, whatever it might be. And they get conflicting messages from a company that says it is very green because it's doing this, and another company that says it's very green because it's doing something opposite. We felt that the industry, the travel industry, historically sets its own targets, creates its own ways of doing things. And yet increasingly outside of the industry, in the wider industrial world or in society, there are increasingly established frameworks for climate action. And whether that's through the IPCC, the science-based targets, etc. And the focus that we saw as important is what is roughly summarised as cut global emissions in half by 2030. And to me, if you talk, you know, it's— we're coming towards the end of 2020, I can talk about what I'm going to do in 2021, '22, '23, right up possibly to 2029, 2030. But if you start asking me what my plans are for 2045 and 2047, it's a meaningless question. And I can't in any way envision other than some sort of sci-fi response. What I do know is that if, if we want to achieve aims of carbon neutral, net zero by 2050, the best chance we have of doing them is to radically, urgently address carbon emissions now.

Yeah. And how radical do you think we should be?

We, depends on who we is, I think.

I think we are everyone because I think that your industry affects, I would hazard a guess, almost everyone. We're talking about the UK here. We're a first world country. So I don't want to put my luxuries onto what— and expect other people to have so many luxuries. But I do go on holiday, and I would hazard a guess that the majority of our listeners go on holiday, and the majority of people in the UK go on holiday, and probably first world countries. So how radical do we, as people who either work in the tourism industry or we as people who use the tourism industry, have to go, do you think?

I mean, my work is entirely industry-focused. I'm not talking directly to people making decisions about how to have their holidays. It's a separate conversation, which we could have, but it's really not what Tourism Declares is about. We very much— again, I feel that tourism has historically said, when the tourist demands it, we will deliver it. And I have always felt that what we need to do is to say, no, no, we know we need to do this, so we will do it so that the tourists can find it, so that it can happen regardless. I don't see that we should wait for someone to demand that we make environmentally sustainable, environmentally unpolluting products before we make them. I think we should make them because we don't want to make polluting products.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, yeah, so disseminating information and helping people.

Yeah. And in terms of, you said, how radical should we be? That is a very— I mean, different parts of the industry, going back to us talking about it being a multifarious sort of industry. If you run a camping organization based in Dorset or take cycling tours or you take people on walks around the East End of London, then the radicalism of your climate action is very different to if you take people on giant 5,000-person cruise holidays, or if you run an airline. And each one of those has a different role to play and different nettle to grasp and different opportunities in terms of engagement. And what I'm trying to do, and I'm not going to pretend it's easy, is to find a place for all of those people working in all of those industries to acknowledge the challenges they each face and maybe somehow find a space to come together to find solutions.

Well, and I think that— and I think there are solutions. I mean, right when we first started, I was talking about how much good I think the travel industry does for the world and how we can't be black and white on an issue like this because basically everyone knows, oh, travel's bad. you shouldn't travel. That's what we're told as general public the whole time. And I personally don't think that that's actually true. I think that there's an awful lot of good that comes out of travel, but equally, it's how do we reduce the emissions on that travel as well? And what do we and how do we play a part? As listeners to this podcast will know, Green Element and Compare Footprints are not firm advocates of carbon offsetting per se. But equally, we've talked to some of your members and people that work in the travel industry that rather than put money into, say, an offset program that has dubious actual positive outcomes at the best part, why not invest in, I don't know, newer technologies for airlines to be reducing those impacts? Changing our conversations around what it is that we're doing will have more of a long-term positive impact than the short-termism, which we tend to jump on. quite quickly?

Yeah, I think, again, I mean, depends on whether we're talking about individual choices or corporate choices. But I believe that the power— I believe, obviously, I believe in the potential of travel to do good. I'm not here working in tourism for the last decade because I'm an anti-travel advocate. I love greatly the industry. Or I love greatly the process of traveling and discovery. I think that we have made too much of an assumption that that process necessitates and is improved by distance, and that the further I go and the more, inverted commas, exotic the place I go, the more rewarding and greater the experience that I have. Yet in the UK, where we have more flights per capita than any other country in the world for leisure, still 50% of the country didn't get on an airplane and go on holiday last year. And the vast majority of people did take some form of holiday, did travel in some way, but they found their pleasures for whatever reason without necessarily getting on an airplane. So we don't have to automatically assume that when we're talking about travel, what we're talking about is flying. We're talking about leaving the place where you live and leaving the process of getting up each day and going to work and taking yourself away somewhere else to relax. And then I think we're in a— and that's a very different conversation to just the idea of talking about the mechanisms of getting on aeroplanes and going places.

Good. Okay. And I think that's where— and it's that education, isn't it? And I think it's talking about it helps for people to understand what we're what we're talking about and what more environmental tourism means.

And not just more environment. I mean, one of the most wonderful organizations I'll happily give a name check to is the Family Holiday Association based in the UK, whose core purpose is to ensure that those people from families that simply cannot afford a holiday, where the very concept for holiday is something way beyond their means, To enable them to get some form of break that gives them, literally gives them a break, that gives them the chance to see something beyond the narrow confines of their life, that gives them the opportunity to just, you know, a child who's 13 years old who's never been to the beach, going to a beach. And it might just be, you know, it's not going to— I'm not talking about going to the Maldives. I'm talking about, you know, going to wherever, you know, the beach and any one of the beaches that surround the UK. And that is treating tourism as a social good. And there's an enormous point of value in that. We see it in doctors in the Orkney Islands. There was a story last year, I think it was, about doctors in the Orkney Islands prescribing birdwatching and rambling rather than pills to people. Now, basically, they were giving— they were saying, why don't you have a holiday? It's going to be better for you than taking these antidepressants. So there's undoubtedly something, and that's what I think why we have to always unpackage the idea that it's about a flight, because it's not. It's about whatever it is. I mean, for me, it's about going on a long walk and connecting with nature. It's about spending time with my wife and getting up late and making a big meal. But that's just my version of it. For other people, it would be about whatever it is, cycling, skiing, exploring a new city, going to an art gallery.

Yeah. And how do you engage people with your messaging? Is there anything that you have done that you've thought that really works really well in the way that you've engaged people with your communication?

Yeah, I think we took a long time. We probably spent 3 months before we launched Initiative. Working out how to launch it and what we should do, and knowing that calling yourself Tourism Declares a Climate Emergency meant that there was a certain sort of you know it was there and it jarred when you came out. And we studied a lot of the pledges that had happened in tourism, and there are a lot of those out there. And I we were concerned that it's that by saying to someone, "Here's our pledge. Come tick a box saying you agree with it." on you go. But that doesn't actually create that great deal of engagement. It's quite easy to do. There's no real barrier to entry. You can just say, yeah, I agree with those things and move on. So what we said is the core commitment of what anyone does who declares a climate emergency is that first of all, they declare the climate emergency on their own website. So all those 135 organizations, individuals, companies who have declared now have a page on their website which is their Tourism Declares commitment. So every single one of them has committed to do that. And the second thing is they've also committed to publishing a climate action plan, so outlining the beginning of their journey towards climate action within 12 months of declaring. So we both time-limited and said, you're going to be doing something with this within the next 12 months, and you're going to put something on your own. You're going to own this. You're going to put it onto your own website. And what that did is it slowed the process of growth down enormously, because I'm sure if we had just farmed out a website, farmed out, if we just put out a website and said, you can click here, we probably would have many more signatories now than we do. But one of the most rewarding things has been the number of conversations I've had with people subsequent to them declaring, where they've said, we thought this was going to be just a really simple process and we thought it was great. So then we sat down and started doing it. And then it became a conversation, and then we wanted to do it properly. So we thought, well, if we're going to do this, we're going to do it properly. And that's why it's taken us 3 months to declare, or 3 weeks, or whatever it might be. And to know that without necessarily having done anything about it actively or directly out there, companies were sitting around as a team, as a group, and making— having a conversation internally about what climate action meant for them. told me that we were bedding in, that we were actually engaging with them beyond the way that we could have possibly imagined. And then, of course, because they then publish on their website, they then share the page on their website and they then share it into their networks. And so it means that rather than having one central point with 135 signatories on it, there's 135 pages shared into 135 social networks and etc., etc., etc. And that to me was a far— although it's taken more time, I think it's created, by that sort of distributed network, has created a far stronger process of engagement in the long run.

Yeah. No. And so where do you see— I mean, are you based in the UK?

I live in France, but my co-founder lives in the UK.

I guess what I'm just wondering is, how UK-centric are you?

And do you see it? No, no, we're not. We, by nature of human connection, I lived in London until last October, and I'd lived in London all my life, and now I live in France. So by nature, a lot of my friends and contacts in the industry are people who I could meet for a coffee or a beer with in London at various times. So of course, we have a strong network in the UK, and that has meant that there probably are currently more UK companies than any other country But that's not the same as saying— there certainly aren't more UK companies, as in there's not— it's not half UK. I mean, I don't actually know what it is, but I'm going to say it's a quarter, and that's just a top-of-head number. We have from all over the world and absolutely global, and all other forms of broadening the diversity and representation of what we do is the core of what we're about. We We will succeed when we represent the whole of the travel industry.

Brilliant, brilliant. Because that's really important, isn't it, that we actually— there's so many good initiatives that come out of so many different countries, but it's a worldwide effort to— I actually don't like the word combat climate change, to be honest with you.

No, do I?

It's just, it's because it actually is the wrong word. It is actually the wrong word because it's not a war on climate change.

I've read a lot of stuff on that. I've done stuff on that before. There's been all of these things like carbon war rooms and the battle against the climate. It's like, guys, if it's a battle, we lose and we just need to find our way back into balance with the atmosphere of which we're part. And yeah. No, I'm not in a war with climate change.

I'm in a— No.

I'm in a seat to remove— but so who is it that says it? Someone says that the climate emergency is carbon in the wrong place. And when we put carbon dioxide back where it works to be the building block of life, it's a great thing. When there's too much of it in the atmosphere, it's problematic. We need to learn how to rebalance our activities with the self-regulating system of the Earth.

Yeah, no, absolutely. Absolutely. And it's a job that needs to be done fast.

Afraid so.

I've got a presentation to do tomorrow to a company, and I quite like doing them because you end up thinking about what are we doing? And I actually don't do them all the time. I used to do them fairly often for some reason, but you end up just going, actually, we are getting there. I honestly think we're getting there. I always come out of them feeling quite positive when you start doing quite a lot of research on where we're going and what we're doing, because there's so many organizations like you that are working with so many other organizations trying to reduce the environmental impact of organizations.

I think there's also, I mean, the thing I've felt, if I've felt one positive from this wretched year has been that people, whether through limited alternative opportunities or whatever it might be, and maybe this is inside of the world I live in of tourism, But the desire to collaborate, as you said, to move on from sort of competitive war mentality towards the idea of, let's work together, let's find ways to share what you know and share what your challenges are and swap what I know and swap what my challenges are. And there's a sort of, I mean, I think the experiences of this year have undoubtedly shown us the need for collaboration, support, Yeah. working together. And I think increasingly people are saying, we're in this together, and let's work together. And that is a positive thing. And maybe, as you said, there's a critical mass of solutions, initiatives, etc., happening where the nature of exponential growth is you don't notice it till it goes to a certain point in the exponential growth, as we've likewise noticed quite regularly this year. And And that works positively. And it might just be that all of a sudden, I mean, I've been talking about carbon and environmental issues for 20 years, and it was a quiet, lonely conversation 20 years ago.

And it's not now. No, I tried getting a job as an environmental manager 20 years ago, and I couldn't get one because I didn't have any experience. And then I was like, well, how do I get experience if you won't give me it? It was rubbish. That's why I ended up working for myself. In the end, it probably wasn't a bad thing, but it was really annoying trying to get into an industry that didn't really exist.

It does now, though, doesn't it? And it's good. And I noticed that someone was asking me about how I felt the climate conversation was going. And I said, well, X years ago, I would have been told by an editor, Oh no, we did climate change in April. We're doing it again next year. It's not on the slate for the editorial calendar for the rest of the year. And now—

Interesting.

You'll be in a conversation with people and the conversation isn't about is it, shouldn't it, how bad is it? It is a— the conversation that this came up in was in this web summit thing I was in last week. And one person was there discussing the merits of drawing down carbon from the atmosphere and someone else was there discussing the merits of natural solutions and someone else was just nature-based solutions and someone else was— we were discussing nuanced varieties of solutions that our industry could get involved with, which is considerably further down a conversation than is it really that scary?

Yeah, yeah. But I think the knowledge of people has got more over the years. I think that we have been talking about this subject for quite a long time now. And okay, there were definitely cycles of where people were talking about it, but I think the fact that people are— their ground knowledge is actually quite high, particularly as a lot of the younger generation have been taught about it in schools for the last 10 years as well. So therefore you've got 10 years worth of the population, the working population, that actually understand what's going on. And then anyone under the age of 18 understands what's going on. So you've almost got 30 years of our population, which let's say is a third, that actually have educationally been talking about it. And then I would say the next third, people have been educated from the media for so long. So I think that's absolutely also helped that kind of tipping point that's happened.

I think that is undoubtedly correct. And I mean, and look, and I don't need to go on about it, but there's no doubt about it that it's in years we launched with the Australian bushfires raging, California, other parts of America had bushfires, decades' worst locust storms across East Africa. We hit so many hurricanes in the Atlantic that we went past giving them names and started just naming them after letters of the Greek alphabet. The mass of evidence is increasingly there. And we're not talking about climate change in 20 years, 30 years, 40 years. We're talking about the lived experience of people all around the world.

And where do you see your organization Going? What do you see as a good thing going forwards?

I think if we can play our part in normalizing across the travel industry reporting and measuring and acting on climate so that as many companies and organizations as possible, and not just the big ones for whom it's a legal requirement, but the industry is making, you know, has a, has what do you want to call it, but a climate budget as much as it has a budget for where it spends its money and where it allocates its resources. If they start considering that they have to think that way inside of those planetary boundaries, and then they start sharing challenges and ideas and best practice with one another so that we build from the idea of doing it, to the idea of doing it better, to the idea of establishing what are the best ways we can do it and sharing those resources. At that point, or increase— and I'm talking about that over the course of the next year or 2— then I think we are at a good place as an industry to use our remarkable, perhaps unparalleled ability to engage because people are, going back to what we were saying earlier, away from work, rested, relaxed, in a process of discovery, to then say to them, look, here's what we've been doing. Here's some really exciting stuff. You can come and stay in our, whatever it might be, solar-powered lodge, eat from the permaculture garden, go on our X and Y tours that are all, you know, live a low and eventually zero emissions lifestyle. And it's not sacrifice, it's pleasurable. And if we can actually get to a point of being able to envision and then build that as a sort of experimental lab for the world, then we'll be doing a hugely vital and, I believe, beneficial role.

Brilliant. And if there was one thing that you'd like our listeners to take away from this conversation with you, What would that be, please?

If your listeners are in the travel industry, and therefore Tourism Declares is open to them, then of course, I would like them to think that it doesn't matter for one piece, doesn't matter at all, whether they are a pioneer in climate action, or literally staring at a blank sheet of paper and no idea what to do. If they want to be part of the framework that we've adopted and part of the community that we are building. We're there for anyone wherever they are on their journey to work together and find answers and support one another in addressing it. Which I actually think, you know, I mean, I don't have a huge amount to say to people who aren't outside of tourism because I've worked my life in tourism, but I don't really see why that shouldn't be the same principle for everyone. I mean, We tend to overly pedestal. We go, oh my God, look at the expert. The expert knows everything. They're the one. I can never be like them. Therefore, I don't have a role to play. And I prefer to dismantle that and to say, if you want to be part of this, find your role and everyone can do something.

Yeah. Look after the pennies and the pounds look after themselves. Basically, isn't it? And how do we connect? How do we connect with you and learn more?

I mean, you can connect at our website, which is tourismdeclares.com. There's obviously easy ways to connect directly through the website, or you can just send an email to info@tourismdeclares.com. If someone wants to connect with me directly, I'm on Twitter @JMCsmith, or my own website for the work I do is jmcsmith.com.

And that's writing?

That's writing consulting. Obviously, I'm here talking for Tourism Declares, but if someone wanted to talk to me about writing and consulting, delighted to have that conversation. But for Tourism Declares, we are tourismdeclares.com, and then for every social channel, it's @tourismdeclares, regardless of which, you know, social channel you look at.

Brilliant, brilliant. Thank you so much for being on today. It's been really, really interesting talking to you and, yeah, listening to more.

Will, thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure.

Thanks for listening to our Sustainable Business Podcast.

If you want to learn more about sustainable business and talk to other like-minded professionals, apply to join our online community at sustainabilitysolved.org. Join now and find a space for you to collaborate, learn, and inspire others to become more environmental. If you enjoyed this podcast, don't forget to follow Green Element on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.