1 . “For thousands of years, humans have raced to be the first to climb a peak, cross a frontier, or document a new species or landscape. Now in some cases, we’re racing to be the last,” said New York Times’ Paige McClanahan.

In recent years, a growing industry has been stimulated by climate change — last-chance tourism. According to Eco Sustainable Solutions, a UK-based organic recycling and waste processing company last-chance tourism is a kind of tourism geared toward seeing the last of something due to climate change. As temperatures and water levels rise, this could mean seizing the last chance to see the Great Barrier Reef, an Arctic glacier and a remote island that is sinking.

As millions of tourists rush to imperiled destinations, some are taking advantage of the increasing demand to spread environmental awareness. One tourist spot, the Sea of Ice in France, opened an exhibit in 2021 to educate visitors on glaciers and climate change. This educational push seems to be having an impact, as a 2023 survey showed that 80% of the visitors would try to learn more about the environment and how to protect it while 77% said that they would reduce their water and energy use.

However, the last-chance tourism industry may become kind of our concern. As more and more people flood into these areas in a panic to see them before they are gone, they in fact contribute to the increased greenhouse gas emissions and over tourism, leading to their destruction. Just as many scholars put it, last-chance tourism is a paradox (悖论).

Although tourists may acknowledge the broader risks and importance of climate change, it’s even more important to connect the responsibility of the individual tourism to the future of our planet. It’s not just about understanding the need to stop climate change; it’s even more important to avoid making it worse.

4 . Look, let’s be honest-there’s no such thing as a “green” vacation. You’ll leave a carbon footprint, no matter what.     1     Here are a few questions to ask:

Is it a B Corp?

B Corps are businesses that meet a strict set of standards by the nonprofit B Lab. They include requirements for governance, workers, customers, community and the environment.     2     You’ll see some fairly well-known brands, like Intrepid Travel. But you won’t find the names of any major airlines, car rental companies or hotel chains-at least, not yet.

Does the company have any other environmental certifications?

Third-party certifications from Green Key, LEED and WELL can be signs that a travel company means business about the environment. Transportation companies may also offer verified certifications from organizations like Terrapass or the Gold Standard Foundation.     3     However, it’s a good start.

    4    

If the company claims to be green, don’t just take its word for it. Listen to what it says. If you see nothing but models on its Instagram channel or ads for online discounts on its site, perhaps it’s a shade of fake green. “A company’s social media strategy is generally a reflection of its current ethos and goals,” explained Julia Carter, founder of Craft Travel.

How deep is its commitment to the environment?

    5     For example, the Travel Corporation publishes an annual impact report that maps its progress against 11 sustainability goals developed by the United Nations. Many cruise lines also publish detailed reports that allow you to check their commitment to the environment against several objective standards.

5 . Aviation is a big polluter. Cutting the sector’s impact on global warming is high on the agenda. Although many governments are regulating emissions from cars and trucks, air transportation is technologically rooted in old patterns.

Facing the reality that the sector will keep emitting a lot, ICAO has established an international carbon-trading plan—Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation, or CORSIA. This encourages wide use of offsets (抵消) : aviation companies can buy emissions credits or invest in sectors that store carbon, such as forestry, to allow them to carry on as normal. CORSIA aims to keep CO2 emissions at 2019 levels through such purchases for emissions over that year’s baseline. ICAO predicts that increasing demand might reach 1. 7 billion tons by 2035, potentially making aviation the largest offset market in the world.

Yet offsetting faces a fundamental challenge: the size of the offset requires estimating flows of warming pollution that would have occurred if the carbon-removal project hadn’t existed, and comparing them against flows with the project in place. The former — a baseline that is unobservable — is a hotbed for shady accounting.

The vast majority of offsets today and in the expected future come from forest-protection and regrowth projects. The track record of reliable accounting in these industries is poor, because they lack convincing baselines. Even with oversight, forest projects are often troubled by wild assumptions, for example that trees would disappear completely from these areas in the absence of those projects, even when there are other forest protections in place. Such assumptions drive up baselines and flood the market with huge volumes of offsets. They make it easier for accountants to claim a net reduction in emissions even though the atmosphere sees little or no benefit. These problems are essentially unfixable. Evidence is mounting that offsetting as a strategy for reaching net zero is a dead end.

In our view, this approach could prove dangerously narrow. Removing aviation’s impact on global warming means upending the industry. The longer that reality is overlooked, the harder it will be to find effective solutions.

6 . The Great Barrier Reef is the world’s longest reef, measuring 2,027 km. Running parallel (平行的) to the coast of Queensland, Australia, the reef is home to many species of fish.

The Great Barrier Reef took thousands of years to form, and has existed for thousands of years, but in just a few short decades we humans have made remarkable progress in killing it. The balance of this ecosystem is being destroyed. Poisonous coastal pollution, overfishing and unsustainable tourism all contribute to the damage done. However, the biggest threat of all is climate change, which causes coral bleaching (珊瑚白化) and other problems.

Coral bleaching is a process that causes coral to turn white in color when exposed to certain stressors, such as changes in temperature or light. As water temperatures rise due to climate change, the algae (海藻) living inside coral becomes poisonous and is expelled from the coral, causing it to lose its color and a major source of food. Not only do the algae produce coral’s color, they also provide 90%of the coral’s energy. Thus, without the algae, most corals will die.

Unfortunately, coral bleaching events are now occurring at an alarming rate. Mass coral bleaching events in the Great Barrier Reef have been recorded in 1998, 2002, 2006, 2016, 2017 and 2020, and they are now expected to become an annual occurrence. The Great Barrier Reef is believed to have lost over 50% of its corals since 1995 and as global warming continues, this number will continue to increase rapidly.

In 2015, the Australian government formed a plan for the protection and preservation of the Great Barrier Reef until 2050. While the plan contains many great aims to improve water quality and restore the reef, there are no measures to deal with the root cause of the issue-climate change.

Solving the most important problem of our generation will require many solutions, such as supporting the use of renewable energy, keeping fossil fuels in the ground, protecting forests, reducing plastic production and preventing unsustainable business practices.

Repairing the damage done to the Great Barrier Reef — and other ecosystems around the world — will be no easy job, but we believe that individuals, businesses and governments will make a change and then there will be hope in the future.

7 . A small car around the size of a Mini Cooper, the Seagull is a fast-charging electric vehicle (车辆) (EV) produced by BYD. It’s hardly a luxury car but it’s well-equipped, with a power driver’s seat and cruise control. The best part? Its base model costs about $10,700 in China. That’s about a third of the cost of the cheapest EV you can buy in the US. In 2018, Trump put, and Biden has since continued, a special 25 percent tax on Chinese-made cars, on top of the ordinary 2.5 percent tax on foreign-made cars, which perfectly shows that however motivated the Biden government might be by climate concerns, it is much more motivated by a desire to help American carmakers.

The basic environmental argument for electric cars is simple: Burning petrol in internal combustion enginest (内燃机) produces CO₂. Electric cars emit (排放) less per mile traveled both because some electricity is generated through clean sources like wind, solar, and because electric motors are far more efficient than petrol engines. EVs are slightly more carbon-intensive (密集) to produce in the first place, but most estimates suggest the lower per-mile emissions of EVs quickly make up for the extra emissions involved in their creation.

But is this still true for Chinese EVs? China still gets more than 60 percent of its electricity from coal, compared to less than 20 percent in the US. So, does this mean that BYD’s cheap EVs are bad for the environment? Hardly. Close to 90 percent of the emissions of a fossil fuel vehicle (化石燃料汽车) are from the combustion of the fuel. Besides, EVs of whatever origin are getting cleaner over time as the electrical grid (电网) gets cleaner. That means EVs will do even more for the environment as the years go on.

The biggest factor for China is that they control all the upstream material supply chain for lithium batteries (锂电池). Even if your EV’s battery is made by a plant of Panasonic in the US, the raw materials for that are processed in China first. “Part of why they’re so successful is they’ve been thinking outside the box on cost reduction for a long time,” an expert says.

8 . One long gray ship at the Port of Los Angeles is doing its part to combat climate change. On the ship, which belongs to Captura, a Los Angeles-based startup, is a system that takes into seawater and sucks out CO₂, which can be used for various purposes or buried. The decarbonated (不含二氧化碳的) seawater is returned to the ocean, where it absorbs more CO₂ from the atmosphere, in a small strike against the massive rise of the greenhouse gas.

After a yearlong experiment, Captura is planning to open a 1000-ton-per-year facility that will bury the captured CO₂ in rock formations under the North Sea. Equatic, another Los Angeles-based startup, is launching an even larger 3650-ton-per-year ocean CO₂ capture plant this year in Singapore.

Supporters say capturing CO₂ from the ocean should be easier and cheaper than a seemingly more direct approach: extracting it directly from the air. Direct air capture, which relies on fans to sweep air past absorbent chemicals, currently costs between $600 to $1000 per ton of CO₂ removed, largely because atmospheric CO₂ is so thin, making up less than 0.05% of the air. Earth’s oceans, in contrast, hold the gas at a concentration nearly 150 times higher, and absorb roughly 30% of all CO₂ emissions each year. Companies say they should ultimately be able to capture CO₂ at $100 per ton, or less.

Ocean capture advocates are seeking government support. In the US, direct air capture plants earn a $180 tax credit per ton of removed CO₂, but Ocean efforts currently don’t qualify. “A similar tax incentive (激励政策) for water-based CO₂ removal is absolutely needed,” says Ruben Brands, CEO of Equatic.

Even if the technology takes off, it will have to scale up massively to make a meaning contribution in offsetting (抵消) global emissions. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, by 2050 we will need to remove some 5 billion tons of CO₂ every year to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5℃. So far, the ocean capture companies are pulling out only thousands of tons. Matthew Eisaman, a chief scientist at Captura, says, “We have an enormous challenge ahead of us.”

10 . Every tropical (热带的) forest looks different, particularly in the eyes of an ecologist, and Peter Ellis has been lucky enough to visit a fair few. One in particular holds a special place in his heart: the rain forests of Gabon. He first visited as a Peace Corps volunteer. “It completely changed the way I think about conservation and our relationship with nature,” he says.

These days, Ellis is the global director of natural climate solutions science at the US-based conservation organization — The Nature Conservancy, where he’s presently investigating the role that logging (cutting down trees) can play in tropical forests. Logging for forest conservation may sound contradictory, and it often is. But logging in a tropical forest looks different to the practices we might expect to see. “We might imagine it as a wasteland of stumps (树桩) after a clear cut,” says Ellis. Instead, only a few trees are actually removed. A sustainably logged forest is the one that remains a breathing, rich, tropical rain forest full of trees and wildlife, thus helping keep a large part of the biodiversity while ensuring that more damaging industries don’t take its place. It can also provide a means of basic livelihood for the local people.

The two years that Ellis spent in the Gabon rain forests opened his eyes to a different method of land management. “The locals took me out into the forest and taught me the names, usages and spiritual significance of all the trees and other plants in the forest,” he says. “Science is about exact, designed experiments, but it’s also about asking the right questions. And the people who live in those places and protect the ecosystem are more likely to help us learn what the right questions to ask are.”

Tropical forests are essential to our planet’s future as they support high levels of biodiversity and act as crucial carbon sinks (碳储存器). “We need to honour, and protect them so that they can do their job to help save us all” says Ellis.