Australia’s Great Barrier Reef tries to make sustainability cool

By Lilit Marcus, CNN

(CNN) — It’s a common quandary: a traveler planning a vacation wants to be responsible, stay at a locally-owned hotel instead of a big chain and hire local guides who can take them off the typical tourist trail. But how?

Mark Olsen, CEO of Tourism Tropical North Queensland, has a name for these kinds of travelers: “conservation-curious.” He describes them as “people who are interested in conservation but don’t know how their holiday and conservation can come together.”

Enter Guardian of the Reef, a website where people planning visits to the Great Barrier Reef can watch informative videos to unlock 10-20% discounts off of hotels or book custom experiences that aren’t available elsewhere. The platform, created with online booking company Expedia, is aimed at travelers who want to spend their money in productive ways but don’t want to spend weeks online researching every single hotel and tour operator.

According to data from Expedia, 90% of its users say they are interested in sustainable options when traveling.

Some of the bookable Guardian of the Reef experiences are traditional tourist activities like snorkeling trips and whale-watching cruises led by certified, licensed eco-guides. Others are specifically about conservation: visitors can help restore seagrass, an important habitat for sea turtles, or place “baby” corals on reefs where they can grow.

Still, there are limits on what the site can provide.

“It doesn’t book your flights,” says Olsen, who adds that travelers should also purchase carbon offsets.

Balancing tourism and ecology

Australia has long struggled to find a happy medium between supporting tourists who want to visit and spend money at the UNESCO World Heritage site and also caring for the reef, which has suffered mass coral bleaching events amid global climate change.

According to Statistics Australia, tourism brought in $57 billion AUD ($38 billion USD) in the 2022-2023 fiscal year, about 2.5% of the country’s total economy.

Many of the travelers who come to Australia head to the Great Barrier Reef, which at 133,000 square miles is about the size of California. It alone is responsible for about $6 billion AUD of the country’s total tourism revenue. An estimated 64,000 people have jobs that depend on reef tourism.

Guardian of the Reef addresses some of those environmental issues head on, acknowledging that climate change is the single biggest challenge to the Reef. However, Olsen believes that tourism is a pro, not a con.

“There’s so many things that consumers can do actively on the Great Barrier Reef, but we say the single most important thing you can do is see it. We know you’re going to fall in love with it, and you’re going to be a part of its conservation for the future,” says Olsen.

More and more destinations are asking – or, in some cases, requiring – travelers to follow certain environmental regulations during their visit.

One the most famous examples is the “Palau Pledge,” where the South Pacific nation asked all visitors to promise to the children of Palau, in writing, to “preserve and protect your beautiful island home.” The pledge is mandatory for visitors and those who break the rules can be fined. The pledge was launched in 2017.

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