Tourism and climate change: adapt or die
This summer we have once again broken records that have made life more difficult for both tourists and, above all, residents: the most persistent heat since records began, nights with lows bordering on 30 degrees in central Mallorca, a Balearic Sea turned into broth at 33 degrees, which will fuel the storms announced for the coming weeks. Faced with this, the magic word is spoken: 'adaptation'. Agreed... but adapt what, how, and, above all, at whose expense? Adaptation to guarantee business profits in a risk scenario, or to guarantee a minimum quality of life for the majority?
Because there is a prior question that neither the Government nor the employers' association wants to ask: is the tourist monoculture viable in an extreme climate scenario? Does "sun and beach" make sense when the sun burns, when summers become increasingly long and unbearable, when going out on the street at four in the afternoon becomes an act of recklessness? While Aena and the industry make record profits, material reality says otherwise: an electrical system that leaves thousands of people stranded in the middle of a heatwave, water reserves at 43% in August, half of Mallorca on pre-alert and Ibiza dry after decades of warnings.
Island territories are doubly vulnerable: we depend on the outside for energy and food, and we have nowhere to escape the heat. We are also part of a Mediterranean that is warming 20% faster than the global average. But being vulnerable does not absolve us of responsibility: the thousands of flights, cruises, yachts, and jets that sustain the model generate global emissions that heat the sea that boils us and also the lands from which those fleeing in makeshift boats die off our coasts. We are victims and, at the same time, perpetrators of climate change.
The response of power is a headlong rush disguised as modernity, what Naomi Klein calls 'disaster capitalism': more desalination plants, more electrical power, more air conditioning, and the eternal promise of 'de-seasonalization', which in practice does not mean distributing tourists, but extending the season. That is to say: grow more. Adaptation understood as a way of not changing anything: spending more energy to combat the heat generated by spending more energy. Adapting the territory to tourism, instead of adapting tourism – and the entire economy – to the limits of the territory. And when the storms arrive, we will once again discover urbanized ravines and flood-prone areas full of tourist accommodations.
This is where we need to talk about climate justice, because heat is not democratic. This summer, Palma and Ibiza are among the European airports with the most private jet traffic, and cruise ships continue to dump their super-emissions into our ports while even violating (voluntary!) passenger limits. At the same time, thousands of families in working-class neighborhoods spend sleepless nights in poorly insulated homes, unable to afford air conditioning, with streets and squares devoid of shade trees. Those who heat the planet the most – the 1% who fly by private jet, the cruise industry, hyper-luxury tourism – are precisely the ones who can best afford to protect themselves from it. And those who have contributed the least pay the price with their bodies, because heat kills, and it kills primarily the elderly, the poor, and those in poorly housed conditions. If heatwaves killed tourists, we would have had a shock plan a long time ago. Any adaptation plan that doesn't start here – trees and shade in neighborhoods, climate shelters, housing rehabilitation, fair tariffs – is not adaptation: it's abandonment.
That's why I maintain that the best climate change adaptation policy we can implement in the Islands has a name that strikes fear in the corridors of power: tourist degrowth and economic diversification. Reducing tourists, flights, cruises, and private jets is not an eccentricity: it's about freeing up the water, energy, land, and labor that we will need for the economy of the future. Local agriculture, industry, and knowledge that provide stable year-round employment, care and public services scaled for the people who live here, a social economy that puts life at the center and not double-digit profits for a few. Diversification is not a luxury for when things are going well: it is the only life insurance against a climate that will make monoculture increasingly uncertain – and more unjust.
Climate change forces us to choose: continue adapting the islands to tourism until heat, thirst, and storms make it impossible, or truly adapt to it. The first option promises us the luxury of Son Vida for a few and heatstroke for others. The second is to make it possible to live – and live well – on these islands thirty years from now. A slogan increasingly on everyone's lips makes it clear: 'Less tourism, more life.' Well, that, exactly that, is adapting to climate change.