Tourism and its impacts projected to grow substantially in Antarctica

Abstract

Antarctica, a region devoted to peace and science, faces an uncertain future amid expanding tourism, which is thought to cause cumulative environmental impacts. Much focus now exists on developing a regulatory framework for Antarctic tourism, but discussions on such a framework lack quantitative projections of tourism growth and its impacts. Here, based on historical data on visitor landings, we use the shared socioeconomic pathways to project numbers of future landings and their impacts. We show that under most scenarios the numbers of landings could grow dramatically by the end of the century, with the high-emission scenarios leading to a 5-fold increase of tourist activities in Antarctica. Landing numbers could be as high as 2 million landings by 2100. Industry-led norms or country-by-country regulation is likely to be less effective for mitigating impacts than an Antarctic Treaty System agreed regulatory framework that is binding.

Contents

Scripts used to assess the impacts of tourism on Antarctica and forecast tourist landings up to 2100.

R scripts:

MASTER - oneimpact.R : code for evaluation of the tourism impacts on penguin colonies, vegetation, and Antarctic Specially Protected Areas.

MASTER - Forecasting Tourism.R : code for forecasting the number of tourist landings on Antartica based on Shared Socioeconomic parthways scenarios.

Data

Tourism data landings: Visitors landing data, from the 1989/90 season to the 2022/23 season were downloaded from the IAATO data repository in September 2023 (https://iaato.org/information-resources/data-statistics/).

Economic indicators: Global gross domestic product (GDP) and GDP growth (% per year) were extractec from the World Bank Database for the years from 1989 to 2022 (https://data.worldbank.org/).

Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP) data: GDP and GDP growth projections for the different scenarios were based on Dellink et al. (2017) and downloaded from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis database (https://iiasa.ac.at/models-tools-data/ssp).

Spatial data on biodiversity values: Coordinates and/or shapefiles for penguin colonies, vegetation, and Antarctic Specially Protected Areas (ASPAs) were extracted from Mapping Application for Penguin Population and Projected Dynamics (MAPPPD; Humphries et al., 2017), the Antarctic vegetation map (Walshaw et al., 2024), and the Australian Antarctic Data Centre (Terauds, 2019), respectively.

References

Dellink, R., Chateau, J., Lanzi, E., & Magné, B. (2017). Long-term economic growth projections in the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways. Global Environmental Change, 42, 200-214.

Humphries, G. R. W., Naveen, R., Schwaller, M., Che-Castaldo, C., McDowall, P., Schrimpf, M., & Lynch, H. J. (2017). Mapping application for penguin populations and projected dynamics (MAPPPD): data and tools for dynamic management and decision support. Polar Record, 53(2), 160-166.

Terauds, A. (2019). Antarctic Specially Protected Areas (Points and Polygons) 2018 Update, Ver. 1, Australian Antarctic Data Centre. doi:10.26179/5c1b10c534c19

Walshaw, C. V., Gray, A., Fretwell, P. T., Convey, P., Davey, M. P., Johnson, J. S., & Colesie, C. (2024). A satellite-derived baseline of photosynthetic life across Antarctica. Nature Geoscience, 1-8.