Stay Grounded webinar: “Re-imagining Tourism in a Future with Less Air Traffic”

To participate in the webinar, please register here.

The advent of mass tourism is inextricably tied to the rise of commercial aviation. Since the 1960s, the constant growth of the tourism industry has accompanied the sustained increase of air traffic. Illustratively, the share of international tourists travelling by air has increased from 46% in 2000 to 59% in 2019 (UNWTO, 2021).
Despite mounting pressure to tackle air traffic’s contribution to global heating, the aviation and tourism industries are poised to continue growing and reinforcing their interdependence. Both industries refuse to recognise that cutting aviation’s GHG emissions requires cutting air traffic itself. Instead, they use the ‘job and wealth creation’, ‘development’ and ‘environmental conservation’ narratives to try to claim that the benefits of their business model justify the damage it causes.
But does (aviation-driven) tourism live up to its promise of delivering prosperity for people and planet? How did aviation and tourism become interdependent? Can they be decoupled? What opportunities are there for a tourist industry with drastically less air traffic? In our upcoming webinar, we will listen to perspectives from Republic Dominican and Spain to answer these questions to understand the current dynamics of both industries, and to explore future socially and ecologically just imaginaries of tourism in line with a steep and just reduction of aviation.

Guest-speakers
Giselle Cedeño – Graduate in Tourism and Hotel Business Administration from the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic (UASD), with a specialisation in Sustainability and Quality Management in Tourism Businesses, and she is a member and collaborator of Alba Sud. She writes about tourism(s), inequality and alternatives from the Dominican perspective.

Carlos Buj – Designer and facilitator of workshops and courses on ecosocial transformation. He has researched public policies to promote international tourism in Spain and founded the cooperative “Viaje a la Sostenibilidad”.

Ernest Cañada – Researcher of tourism from critical perspectives, postdoctoral researcher at the University of the Balearic Islands (UIB) and founding member of Alba Sud. Since 2016 he has been an expert member of the Tourism and City Council of Barcelona City Council. Among other topics, he focus on post-capitalist emancipatory alternatives in tourism.

Language of webinar
The main language will be Spanish with English interpretation.

Time
6:00 pm (CET)
1:00 pm (Santo Domingo, GMT -4)
11:00 am (Mexico City, GMT -6)

Registration link:
https://stay-grounded.org/registration-webinar-tourism-aviation