Professor Emma J. Stewart visits Parul University for research & academic collaborations!
Prof. Emma J. Stewart, PhD, is the Dean of the Faculty of Environment, Society and Design at Lincoln University, New Zealand. She spoke to students of the Faculty of Applied Sciences at Parul University on climate change, wildlife conservation, tourism, and the communities that depend on them.
Climate change and the places people travel to see
Prof. Stewart began with a simple observation: climate conditions are worsening quickly, and the consequences reach well beyond weather. Many destinations draw visitors precisely because of what they hold in the natural world: a glacier, a reef, a forest, or a population of animals seen nowhere else, and these are clear places to watch climate change at work, because the damage to the environment and the damage to the visitor experience happen together. Nature-based tourism, she noted, sits where ecosystems, people, and economies meet, so a change in any one affects the other two.
Last Chance Tourism and the polar bears of Churchill
She is the founder of Last Chance Tourism, the growing trend of travelling to a location or seeing a species before it is affected or gone due to climate and environmental changes. It has a painful implication: If a place is at risk, then people may be more interested in seeing the place, even though it is at risk. She finally made this concrete through polar bear tourism in Churchill, Canada, where people come to experience polar bears in the wild. Sea ice is an essential habitat for the bears to hunt; therefore, Arctic warming has direct impacts on bears and the tourism industry. It is a place that’s exposed in a certain way, she said, because the bears can’t be moved, replaced, or rebuilt; the guides, the operators, and many support workers’ livelihoods depend on the bears. From climate research to wildlife conservation, begin your career in sustainability by studying environmental science programs such as BSc and MSc in Environmental Science from Parul University!
From Last Chance to Lost Chance
Prof. Stewart treated climate change as a tourism, economic, and social concern, not only an environmental one, since the loss of an ecosystem is also the loss of the activities and livelihoods that depend on it. That led to her central question: what happens when the last chance itself disappears? She offered the idea of Lost Chance Tourism, the point at which the landscapes, ecosystems, or wildlife that attracted visitors are gone or fundamentally changed, leaving the delayed traveller with no opportunity and the community with no basis for its tourism. Her lesson for applied science students was that protecting nature and protecting the experiences, livelihoods, and opportunities built on it are the same task.
