mass tourism scholarly articles

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

• Publications
• Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

• Advanced Search
• Journal List
• Springer Nature - PMC COVID-19 Collection

Present-Day Mass Tourism: its Imaginaries and Nightmare Scenarios

Utrecht, Amsterdam The Netherlands

Present-day mass tourism uncannily resembles an auto-immune disease. Yet, self-destructive as it may be, it is also self-regenerating, changing its appearance and purpose. They are two modes that stand in contrast to each other. We can see them as opposites that delimit a conceptual dimension ordering varieties of present-day mass tourism. The first pole calls forth tourism as a force leaving ruin and destruction in its wake or at best a sense of nostalgia for what has been lost, the other sees tourism as a force endlessly resuscitating and re-inventing itself. This paper article highlights both sides of the story. These times of the Covid-19 pandemic, with large swathes of public life emptied by social lock-down, remind us of a second, cross-cutting conceptual dimension, ranging from public space brimming with human life to its post-apocalyptic opposite eerily empty and silent. The final part of my argument will touch on imagined evocations of precisely such dystopian landscapes.

This is what present-day tourism has brought us. As Oliver Hardy would have it, in one of the many films starring him and Stan Laurel: Another nice mess you got us into. Photographs amply illustrate this. They show us the congestion, even back-ups, en route to the top of Mount Everest. Or the dense forest of outstretched arms and selfie sticks that prevent us from seeing eye to eye with Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. They show all these cruise ships, ready to sail from Venice, New Orleans and other such ports-of-call, holding out the promise of fulfillment of our innermost private dreams and longings. Among them the classic dream that inspired travel in the days of the “grand tour,” seen as part of the education of aristocrats, of either noble or moneyed background, the elite of the happy few of their time. In today’s mass tourist version, all such dreams have been subverted and turned into their nightmarish opposite. Hordes of tourists now swoop down on places never meant to cope with their numbers. It may remind us of Henry James’s sense of horror when confronted with the mass of immigrants setting foot on Ellis Island. In The American Scene, written following a return visit to his native country and presenting a view of America seen through the eyes of the quasi-European that James had become, he compared the influx of immigrants to a “visible act of ingurgitation on the part of our body politic and social.” He goes on to ponder “the degree to which it is his American fate to share the sanctity of his American consciousness, the intimacy of his American patriotism, with the inconceivable alien … an apparition, a ghost, … in his supposedly safe old house.” 1 This is an apt description of what inhabitants of today’s tourist destinations, ago-old port cities like Venice or Amsterdam, must be feeling in the face of the hordes of visitors dumped by one cruise ship following another. Admittedly, the visitors today are tourists, not immigrants, but they must strike a Jamesian sensibility in similar ways. And according to alarmed newspaper reports local resistance and protest in tourism’s most favored places is growing apace. The current buzzword in city government circles is over-tourism. As a piece in Atlantic magazine on “the Dutch war on tourists” put it: “The Dutch have suffered some brutal occupations, from the Roman empire and Viking raids to Spanish and Nazi rule. But now they face an even larger army of invaders: tourists.” 2 In the era of cheap flights and Airbnb, their numbers are staggering. Some 19 million tourists visited the Netherlands last year, more people than live there. For a country half the size of South Carolina, with one of the world’s highest population densities, that is a lot. The problem for Amsterdam, in its starkest form, is a matter of survival as a working, residential city, rather than as a playground for tourists to trample underfoot. Venice may be closer to meeting that fate, with its residential population dwindling. And so may New Orleans after Katrina. In New Orleans: An American Pompeii? , Lawrence N. Powell demonstrates that the rebuilding of New Orleans’ infrastructure, which had been long due for an extreme makeover, is in danger of crossing over the fine line separating opportunity from opportunism, whether it be the opportunism of commercialism or racism or a combination of the two. The recovery of New Orleans, as Powell argues, may have resulted in one of those ‘lost cities’, like Pompei, that have been restored solely as sites of tourism and myth. 3

Present-day mass tourism uncannily resembles an auto-immune disease. In a fevered feeding frenzy, it turns in upon itself eating away at the very tissue meant to be preserved. Like locusts swarming, tourism is seasonal, swooping down, leaving devastation in its wake. Yet, self-destructive as it may be, it is also self-regenerating, changing its appearance and purpose. The destruction side of the story I will tell here relates to an iron law in economics, the commodification paradox: there are things that by general consent are deemed of high intrinsic value yet are inconsistent with the economic logic of price and exchange value, or for that matter, the conceptual universe of economic goods and commodities. Once exposed to that logic, they vanish like snow melting in the sun. By way of examples, we need only think of exquisite geographic spots or authentic historic settings and see them vanish forever when opened to consumption by the many. The other half of my story offers redemption, in a post-modern vein. It explores the imitative behavior of tourists seeking reiterations of pleasures they have seen or heard described, if not vicariously experienced through mass advertising. Here the main vector of tourist behavior is not the quest for the pristine and virginal, but rather the urge to do as others did, and to join the multitudes who went before, all engaging in such acts of quasi-individuation as taking a selfie as proof of one’s presence. The ultimate self-ironizing version – post-modern before its time - is the classic graffiti telling us that “Kilroy was here”. Well, he wasn’t; yet clearly someone was wishing to leave proof of presence, tongue-in-cheek, in an implied wink to the many Kilroys yet to come. Clearly these two modes of tourist pleasure stand in contrast to each other. We can see them as opposites that delimit a conceptual dimension ordering varieties of present-day mass tourism. One polar end we may call – in an echo of a 1910s’ cliffhanger film series, The Perils of Pauline – “the perils of pristine.” The other end we shall call “the pleasures of post-modernity.” The first pole, then, calls forth tourism as a force leaving ruin and destruction in its wake or at best a sense of nostalgia for what has been lost, the other sees tourism as a force endlessly resuscitating and re-inventing itself.

The Perils of Pristine

There may be no better way to illustrate the tragic paradox inherent in the human enjoyment of the pristine than the case of George Bird Grinnell, prominent early American conservationist. He had made it out West just in time to watch one era fade into another, on the eve of the Transcontinental Railroad opening the West to the many interests that had been eagerly eying it, and before Buffalo Bill’s mastery at turning contemporary history into the stuff of spectacle and mass entertainment had begun to re-write the epic of the West. Grinnell was among those who had an early awareness of the need, if not the moral duty, to preserve natural habitats and wildlife. Perhaps his greatest legacy is Glacier National Park in Montana, which he did more than anyone else to help protect, and where Mt. Grinnell now looks down on Grinnell Glacier. By the time of his last trips, in the 1920s, it was no longer the wild place he had first encountered. As he wrote to the soon-to-be-famous young conservationist Aldo Leopold, “While I have never regretted what I did in this matter because of the pleasure those parks give to a vast multitude of people, still the territory that I used to love and travel through is now ruined for my purposes.” 4 This tragic awareness that the democratic sharing of his pleasures inescapably ruined them “for his purposes” lies at the heart of the conundrum that I flippantly call the perils of pristine.

Yet, undeniably, one perennial force moving people temporarily to leave home and hearth and go out into the wider world is the urge to explore and discover, to go where no-one has gone before, in hopes of striking upon the terrestrial paradise. And more than that, upon their return home, to engage in the games of one-upmanship that we all play, bragging about that pristine little beach or that bucolic little restaurant off the tourist track. We thus feed the mass reservoir of tourist longing, keeping people leafing through the pages of travel magazines, with one tantalizing view after another of places untouched by tourism. As one such magazine promises: We create memories. Rather a sophisticated view, in fact, coming as it does from a travel agency. For indeed: rather than promising novel experiences and new discoveries, the slogan anticipates the next stage: the translation of travel experiences into memories. Memories which we then share with others, leading them to follow in our footsteps – finding that pristine beach, that recondite little restaurant. Rather than creating memories it has become a matter of re-creation , in whichever sense of that word. Those following in our footsteps re-create our memories while making them their own. This is how tourism translates into a mass phenomenon, turning private memories into commodities advertised and held up for imitation. Peddling what are basically second-hand goods tourism endlessly recycles the standard tourist fare, boosting tourist numbers while ruining what made the tourist herds flock together in the first place. We may call the driving force here, in a Freudian vein, memory envy. The travel agenda in such cases is essentially of this type: Been there, Seen it, Done that. It has become a matter of ticking off places to go, to see, and produce a selfie. Today’s travel destinations are literally “lieux de mémoire”, to be visited before they are remembered, placed on the map by other people’s memories.

Things are different in the case of nostalgia. If memory still plays a role, it is the remembrance of things past, or more crucially of things irretrievably lost, yet awaiting their re-imagining. The setting is Proustian rather than Freudian. If it calls for travel, it is time travel, temporal and imaginary, rather than geographical. It can be done as an act of individual imagination, without ever leaving one’s armchair. One can, for instance, sit listening to Aaron Copland’s music, such as his Rodeo , while before one’s mind’s eye a film screen is widening to vast panoramas of the American West. If this is travel, it is a matter of the power of our imagination. Yet, in today’s world, our every wish can be accommodated by the market, and time travel now fills pages of tourist guides. If with the advent of the U.S. Interstate system, from the late 1950s on, fabled stretches of highway like Route 66 lost their raison d’être, and were left for weeds to take over, stretches are now – nostalgically – put back into use. Tourists from the US and Europe, their heads filled with Western imagery, from wide-screen cinema, songs from musicals, photographs, are now catered for with organized tours. They will find their Harley Davidsons waiting and off they go, in search of an America gone forever, yet now to be nostalgically revived. Route 66 has been re-invented as our collective present-day memory lane.

Examples abound of this happening. Civil-War battle fields, with historical re-enactments thrown in to the hearts’ content of visiting history buffs, the Appalachian Trail, freshly done up, with the added bonus of Bill Bryson’s dry wit reporting on his revisit of the trail, Crevecoeur’s travels in America as revisited in Jonathan Raban’s Hunting Mister Heartbreak , immersions in the history of railroad hotels like the Posada Hotel in Winslow Arizona (while hearing in one’s head the lyrics of “Standing on a corner in Winslow Arizona,” sung by the Eagles), or a stay at mountain resorts such as Bretton Woods, feeling the spectral presence of great minds like Lord Keynes’s putting together the pieces of a new world order in the mid-1940s. 5 Such imaginary time travel is probably what the great Dutch historian Johan Huizinga had in mind when he tried to find words for the historic epiphany he experienced when entering Cologne cathedral from the bustling city center, in pre-World-War II days. To Huizinga it felt like stepping back into the peace and quiet of the Middle Ages. Time seemed to fall away. He described it as the quintessence of the experience of history, as an act almost of world renunciation in exchange for the order of the monastic, medieval world.

A contemporary version of this quest for sites of nostalgia is the Spa, the Grand Hotel, the fabled watering holes across the map of Europe, playground and meeting place for the international upper crust. They are sites of nostalgia today, remnants of a past long gone, vanished along with the “Belle époque” whose outward face they represented. Yet at the same time, vanished they may be, they refuse to be laid to rest. A cultural revival is afoot, in books and films, opening the doors of the past to our nostalgic promptings. The prime exhibit may well be a cinematic masterpiece, Russian Ark , from 2002. In one uninterrupted, long take – a technical tour de force – the director, Alexander Sokurow, takes us through three centuries of Russian history, set in the labyrinthine maze of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. If this already is a trip that no travel agency can rival, the concluding moments give form and face to the process of history turning into instant nostalgia. While a magnificent ball is coming to an end and the many guests start flowing down the stairways, the camera wanders off to a door opening on the river Newa, with mist rolling in. It is an ominous closing image of an era coming to and end, engulfed by forces of darkness. It appears as if nostalgia for an era closing forever is shown here at the point of its formation.

In this general vein of nostalgic revisits to memory sites, a few more cases bear mentioning. The Grand Hotel as an emblem of a European cultural era has been stunningly brought back to life in Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), with all the sense of decorum, punctilious rituals, and deference to status differentials. It is the world that that quintessential central-European author Stefan Zweig conjured up in Die Welt von gestern ( The World of Yesterday ), the book he wrote in self-chosen exile in Brasil in 1942. 6 He committed suicide there, while his beloved Europe succumbed to Nazi totalitarianism. Wes Anderson dedicated his film to the memory of Zweig. More than that, he has Zweig make a fictional appearance in the closing scenes of the film, where he is shown reminiscing with the hotel’s current owner about his predecessor, Monsieur Gustave, the man who had truly embodied the world of the Grand Budapest Hotel. Although, as his successor clarifies, it had not even been Monsieur Gustave’s world: “His world? No, his world had vanished before he ever entered it. He certainly sustained the illusion with marvelous grace.” So, in this game of ever receding illusions, the true spirit of nostalgia is beautifully captured, and shown as the mirage it is.

Using a different medium, the novel rather than film, Dutch novelist Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer added to the metaphoric power of the Grand Hotel as standing for a certain idea of Europe when he called his latest novel Grand Hotel Europe (2019). 7 Rather than an attempt at revival, though, showing a European cultural era at full swing, it catches it as it fades away, as in a yellowing old photograph. The hotel guests are like assorted relics from a bygone era. The novel’s protagonist seeks refuge among them to lick his wounds after the break-up of a relationship with Clio, an Italian art historian named after the Greek muse of history. The sense of things coming to an end, winding down, pervades the novel. More than anything it conjures up Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain or Death in Venice , stations for the terminally ill rather than sites of excitement. The prevailing mood in Grand Hotel Europe is of decay rather than decadence, seeing entropy, a terminal winding down, in the bustle of tourism and travel. As the few remaining resident guests at the Grand Hotel Europe look at it, travel and tourism, in their present-day iteration, are forces of destruction.

When Clio and the novel’s protagonist were still together, during a visit to the Castello Mackenzie in Genoa, a nineteenth-century fantasy structure erected in mock Florentine renaissance style, their conversation touches on the theme of authenticity and its replica versions. Castello Mackenzie, fake when it was built, a nostalgic dream come true, had since been put on the list of protected architectural monuments. As Clio puts it: “This is nostalgia squared, a quadratic version of it.” Both agree that it will never be the real thing, never be truly old. The writer then adds “I think it is our European blood. This way of thinking typifies us Westerners. It is the curse of the old continent. … You could summarize the history of Europe as a history of the continued longing for history.” If the remembrance of things past constitutes the dreams we dream today, nostalgia will be the defining element of our outlook on life. And as for the quest for authenticity, taking the Mona Lisa as an example, the writer has this to say: “What matters is that people want to see the Mona Lisa not for the sake of the experience of seeing her in reality. What matters is what Walter Benjamin called the aura of the work of art. Or rather, not so much the work of art itself, but the sensation of being up close to it, preferably stamped with the seal of authenticity of a photograph or a selfie.” (63, 113).

We’ll leave Pfeijffer on this ironically deconstructionist view of present-day tourism. He is keenly aware of Europe as a stage for global tourism, caught in an existential battle between the urge to preserve an authentic cultural heritage, while seeing it buckle under when confronted with the many in their quest for the real thing. He also repeats a point made by others before him, by observers such as Umberto Eco or Jean Baudrillard, that often the fake is to be preferred to the real thing, the simulacrum to the authentic version. Europe’s crumbling cultural heritage is to be admired many times over in the U.S., in Las Vegas and other such places. And what is more, Europe has jumped on the bandwagon, repackaging itself in Disney-like tourist versions, for bus loads of Chinese tourists to behold and capture on cellphones. There is a hilarious TV documentary on this, made over a decade ago: Theme Park Holland ( Pretpark Nederland ). 8

Here too the hungry beast of commercial mass tourism has discovered the value and attraction of nostalgia. It has moved up-market to cater for the tastes of tourist snobs (who will never admit to this). It now offers upscale nostalgic tours while packaging and selling the authentic historical experience. High-brow newspapers now offer city tours, 25 days, all-in, with expert guides, and the odd afternoon lecture on board the cruise ship, to places ranging from San Francisco and New York, to Athens and Berlin. They are on tantalizing display in the ads, ready for consumption. Been there, done that. The true spirit of history, the historical experience, is nowhere to be had. “Just follow the guide, please.” To visitors and locals alike, the effect is the same. To residents the place is no longer theirs, to visitors, authenticity is nowhere to be found. As Tony Perrottet, author of Pagan Holiday , who lives in Manhattan, put it: “God, there’s nothing more annoying than getting stuck on Fifth Avenue between a bunch of tourists.” 9 Yet, according to him, anti-tourist sentiment can be traced at least as far back as the first and second centuries A.D., when wealthy Romans visited Greece (where they complained about the food), Naples (where they complained about the guides), and Egypt (where they defaced the pyramids and the Sphinx with graffiti). “The structure of tourism historically is that you have resentful locals, and rich, obnoxious, clueless intruders: the Greeks and the Romans, the Brits and the Americans, the Dutch and Germans.” 10 This may suggest there being a deep structure to the trials and tribulations visited equally upon tourists and their locales over the ages. If so, it is a far cry from a more reflective mental attitude, characteristic of the traveler more than the tourist. It may put us in mind of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s ruminations in his Tristes Tropiques (first published in 1955). Reminiscing on his peregrinations as a researcher and traveler, he describes himself as “an archeologist of space, seeking in vain to recreate a lost local colour with the help of fragments and debris.” It inspires the following lament: “I wished I had lived in the days of real journeys, when it was still possible to see the full splendour of a spectacle that had not yet been blighted, polluted and spoilt.” In other words, a spectacle that had managed to stay pristine, untouched by the march of time and the ruins of tourism. Yet, as Lévi-Strauss then acknowledges, this view of things creates a false binary, suggestive of a before and after, falsely imposing a view of history as a matter of static formations succeeding each other rather than as an ongoing transformative process. “While I complain of being able to glimpse no more than the shadow of the past, I may be insensitive to reality as it is taking shape at this very moment.… A few hundred years hence … another traveller, as despairing as myself will mourn the disappearance of what I might have seen, but failed to see.” 11

In this vein, moving now to the second part of my argument, the challenge before us will be to avoid the trap as sketched here by Lévi-Strauss and to take a fresh look at tourism as it changes shape before our eyes.

The Pleasures of Post-Modernity

“Historical marker ahead.” Driving along America’s highways and by-ways we pass many such signs. I for one always duly stop, curious to find out what local boosters have deemed worthy of a fleeting moment’s reflection by transient travelers. That is all as it should be. Hardly ever has a historical marker served to create a true “lieu de mémoire.” Places thus marked sink back into oblivion the moment we step on the gas again. Yet, at times, the marker may become more than the impassive purveyor of tidbits of knowledge and speak to us in the active voice of a participant in history. Or shall we say: a silent witness.

A telling case is that of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year old black Chicago youngster, who when visiting his uncle in the Mississippi Delta, in 1955, was viciously murdered by whites in retaliation for allegedly having wolf-whistled at a white female shop assistant. It became one of the moments that helped to launch the Civil Rights movements in the late 1950s. Certainly a moment worthy of a historical marker. Yet rather than becoming a token of remembrance, bringing reconciliation, it drew the ire of local white supremacists, who vented their anger on the monument. In its present iteration it is the fourth marker on the spot where Emmett Till’s mutilated body was drawn from the waters. Previous markers were stolen, thrown in the river, replaced only to be riddled with bullet holes, cut down, replaced again, shot up again. The new memorial weighs 500 pounds and is made of reinforced steel covered in bullet-proof glass. It is surrounded by security cameras. Two weeks after having been put in its place six white men and two women gathered there. One carried the flag of a group called the League of the South, which advocates for “Anglo-Celtic” supremacy. Its founder, Michael Hill, said: “We are at the Emmett Till monument that represents the civil-rights movement for blacks. What we want to know is: when are all of the white people over the last fifty years that have been murdered, assaulted and raped by blacks going to be memorialized?” When the security cameras picked up the protest and triggered an alarm, the protesters ran away.

Just sixteen miles south lies Glendora, a small town that houses the largest collection of memorials, including an Emmett Till museum. Glendora is one of the poorest towns in the impoverished Mississippi Delta. There is even an NGO devoted to combating poverty in – mind you – Haiti, Guatemala, Peru – and Glendora. In 2009 the Mississippi Development Authority sent a team of economists to the town. After describing it as a place with “no hope,” they said its only viable asset was civil-rights tourism. In an utter twist of irony, the hope now is to bring tourists to a place meant to commemorate the plight of blacks and their civil rights struggles and to pay their respects to the historic victims of racism, when in fact the place more easily rallies its evil perpetrators.

All in all, this is not the sort of story that your average roadside historical marker has in store. If a marker put up in Glendora would tell a story, it would be a never-ending story, with no clear end in sight, no upward slope, no light at the end. If it conjures up a past nostalgically remembered, it is the wrong past of racism and white supremacy. If there is anything postmodern about this, it must be in its mass-media iterations, with a current president as ringleader who sees “good people on both sides,” and to whom there is an equivalence on all sides of moral issues. There may in fact, under America’s present political leadership, be a vast moral erosion at work, leaving everything morally polyvalent, equally plausible, equally capable of being turned into mass entertainment.

As for tourism and the urge to travel and trade places, a similar erosion may be at work. Like moral issues in the public realm tourist destinations have likewise become interchangeable, open to the total make-over that the masters of mass manipulation can give them. Exclusivity is simply a matter of claiming it in the face of mass-produced uniformity, as Don de Lillo describes his students entering to attend class: “They came in out of the sun in their limited-edition T-shirts.” Limited edition, yet mass-produced. Hypes can be created, tourist flows can be got going, directed and changed. A classic illustration of this happening is Don de Lillo’s hilarious spoof about a tourist attraction known as “the most photographed barn in America.” As he tells the story in his deadpan way, he takes a young colleague who has joined his department of Hitler Studies in Blacksmith, a god-forsaken little college town somewhere in the mountain West. “We drove twenty-two miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the signs started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. There were forty cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides – pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray - the narrator’s young colleague – maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book. “No one see the barn,” he said finally. A long silence followed. “Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.” He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced at once by others. “We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies.” There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides. ‘Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We only see what the others see. The thousands that were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception. This literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism. Another silence ensued. “They are taking pictures of taking pictures,” he said. He did not speak for a while. We listened to the incessant clicking of shutter release buttons, the rustling crank of levers that advanced the film. “What was the barn like before it was photographed?” he said. “What did it look like, how was it different from other barns, how was it similar to other barns? We can’t answer these questions because we’ve read the signs, seen the people snapping the pictures. We can’t get outside the aura. We’re part of the aura. We’re here, we’re now.”

He seemed immensely pleased by this.” 12

This is probably as good an evocation as any of the pleasures of post-modernism. It is a matter of a second-order pleasure, derived from going with the flow, from doing as others do, from waiting in line to take the same picture as others just did, yet at the same time reaching transcendence, seeing yourself in the crowd, yet as if from a distance. There is a double vision involved, and a dose of irony thrown in for free. This takes us one step further than De Lillo: We are part of the aura, yet we can also at the same time step outside it. And photography is there to prove it. A beautiful illustration of this is offered by a classic photograph taken by Lee Friedlander. 13 The tourist scene it shows is Mount Rushmore, photographed from many angles, in many reflections, blurring inside and outside. These are people who, as De Lillo would have it, are all part of the aura, all here, all now. Yet Friedlander’s photograph has become a critical ingredient in our enjoyment of the moment. He deconstructs reality for us, decomposing it into mirrorlike reflections of reflections; as in an early Cubist phantasy, he produces an ironic comment and gives us pleasure. Friedlander adds the layer of photography to the mirrorlike layers that he had chosen to photograph; the entertainment he offers is not unlike the awe we feel when confronted with the circus act of a man keeping cups and saucers up in the air. Such are the joys and pleasures offered by the asinine forms of contemporary mass tourism, if we allow ourselves to transcend it, and becoming its ironic observers. All we need to do is develop an eye and an ear for it. If Kilroy can do it, why can’t we?

Well, for one thing, as the first half of my story may remind us, the commodification paradox will keep us from over-indulging in the pleasures of post-modernity. It may serve as a sobering reality check. Admittedly, the pleasures of post-modern tourism, as here described, all have an undeniable high-brow touch, a whiff of elitism, about them. Particularly in their armchair variety where the joy lies in versions of inner, imaginary, travel, as almost a form of escapism, a form of inner emigration. At any rate, it will always be a joy for an elite and will never be able to rival the immediate exhilaration and excitement of contemporary mass tourism, from snow mobiles racing through Yellowstone Park or masses of down-hill skiers laying waste to fragile mountain meadows. Over-tourism as a force devastating every object of mass-longing is here to stay, it seems, offering no escape.

Whatever glimmers of hope there are may be too late. Movements of resistance may be gestating, centering on issues of ecological sustainability, rallying support around shared feelings of shame and guilt. Buzzwords are spreading like wildfire over the Internet, words like flight shame, originating in Sweden, are exerting downward pressure on air travel, inspiring people to reduce their carbon footprint. Even in consumer hotbeds like China, climate consciousness is on the rise. It enjoys an Instagram-fueled tailwind from successful campaigns against plastics. A global movement is gaining momentum that grants legal personhood to rivers, lakes, forests and mountains. In its American iteration the movement takes a leaf, ironically, from the long-standing corporate practice that turns corporate entities into legal persons, giving them a voice and having them speak on behalf of corporate interests. This time environmentalism is in command, speaking on behalf of threatened eco-systems, such as lakes and valleys. A recent case is the Lake Erie Ecosystem Bill of Rights, adopted by 61% of the voters in a February, 2019, referendum, granting the Lake Erie ecosystem legal personhood, with all consequent rights in law, including the right “to exist, flourish, and naturally evolve.” It joined other more-than-human entities accorded legal personhood, in India, New Zealand, the Colombian Amazon and Ecuador. All such recent legal moves have come to be known as the “natural rights” or “rights of nature” movement. 14

Whether such movements, and the changes in the ways people think and behave about the environment, are enough to fend off the worst-case environmental scenarios, we cannot tell. Doomsday scenarios may still appear more likely outcomes, with tourism no more than an echo from a time before the ultimate cataclysm. Again, De Lillo may help us to conjure this up in our minds. Having given us a taste of the post-modern pleasures of travel in his passages about the most-photographed barn in its quasi-Arcadian setting, the setting changes to one where cataclysm has struck. We enter familiar De Lillo terrain, as in his Cosmopolis , or Falling Man. In an inspired moment the story line turns back on itself - with the central characters fleeing from the toxic cloud that hangs over Blacksmith, leaking from a derailed tank car in the railroad yard - they pass a road sign, pointing them to the most photographed barn in America. Tourism has overnight turned into a flight for one’s life, in a nightmare world reminiscent of literary evocations like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or Jonathan Raban’s Surveillance. 15 No more postmodern pleasures to be had here, nor are any on offer.

is professor emeritus and former chair of the American Studies program at the University of Amsterdam, where he taught until September 2006. He is Honorary Professor of American Studies at the University of Utrecht and is a past president of the European Association for American Studies (EAAS, 1992–1996). He is the founding editor of two series published in Amsterdam: Amsterdam Monographs in American Studies and European Contributions to American Studies .

1 Henry James, The American Scene, quoted from etext of The American Scene (London, Chapman & Hall, ltd., 1907), at http://www2.newpaltz.edu/~hathawar/americanscene2.html . Last accessed January 4th, 2020, pp. 84,85.

2 Rene Chun, “The Dutch War on Tourists,” https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/09/the-war-on-tourists/594766/ . Last accessed January 4th, 2020.

3 Lawrence N. Powell, New Orleans: An American Pompeii? In: Reinhold Wagnleitner, ed., Satchmo Meets Amadeus (Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2006) 147.

4 John Taliaferro, Grinnell: America’s Environmental Pioneer and His Restless Drive to Save the West. (New York: Liveright/Norton, 2019).

5 Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods : Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail (New York: Broadway Books, 1998); Jonathan Raban, Hunting Mr Heartbreak (London: Collins Harvill, 1990).

6 Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday (translated from German by Anthea Bell) (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013).

7 Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer, Grand-Hotel Europa (Amsterdam: Arbeiderspers, 2019) References – in brackets – are to pages in the Dutch version. Translations are mine.

8 Michiel van Erp, Pretpark Nederland (TV documentary, VPRO Television, 2006).

9 Tony Perrottet, Pagan Holiday: On the Trail of Ancient Roman Tourists (New York: Random House, 2003).

10 Perrottet, as quoted in Chun, The Atlantic (cf. footnote 2, above).

11 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (1955) London: Penguin Books, 1992 (translation by John Weightman, and Doreen Weightman; Introd. and Notes by Patrick Wilckens) pp. 43, 44, 45.

12 Don DeLillo, White Noise (1984) London: Picador, 2011, quotations from pp. 13-15, 30.

13 Go to https://sites.middlebury.edu/landandlens/2016/10/16/lee-friedlander-mt-rushmore-south-dakota-1969/

14 Robert MacFarlane, “Should this valley have rights?”, The Guardian Weekly, 8 November 2019 ( https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/nov/02/trees-have-rights-too-robert-macfarlane-on-the-new-laws-of-nature ) Also: Stone, Christopher D., “Should Trees Have Standing? Towards Legal Rights for Natural Objects,” Southern California Law Review , 45 (1972): 450-501 For a discussion of the rise of corporate legal persons and their disembodied voices, see my “The Revenge of the Simulacrum: The Reality Principle Meets Reality TV,” Social Science and Modern Society , 56, 5, (September/October 2019): 419-427.

15 Cormac McCarthy, The Road (New York: Random House, 2007), Jonathan Raban, Surveillance (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006).

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

• View all journals
• Explore content
• About the journal
• Publish with us
• Sign up for alerts
• Published: 24 June 2019

Shifts in tourists’ sentiments and climate risk perceptions following mass coral bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef

• Matthew I. Curnock   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-2365-810X 1 ,
• Nadine A. Marshall 1 ,
• Lauric Thiault   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5572-7632 2 , 3 ,
• Scott F. Heron   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-5262-6978 1 , 4 , 5 ,
• Jessica Hoey 6 ,
• Genevieve Williams 1 , 6 ,
• Bruce Taylor 7 ,
• Petina L. Pert   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-7738-7691 1 &
• Jeremy Goldberg 1 , 8  

Nature Climate Change volume  9 ,  pages 535–541 ( 2019 ) Cite this article

15k Accesses

55 Citations

53 Altmetric

Metrics details

• Climate-change impacts
• Psychology and behaviour

Iconic places, including World Heritage areas, are symbolic and synonymous with national and cultural identities. Recognition of an existential threat to an icon may therefore arouse public concern and protective sentiment. Here we test this assumption by comparing sentiments, threat perceptions and values associated with the Great Barrier Reef and climate change attitudes among 4,681 Australian and international tourists visiting the Great Barrier Reef region before and after mass coral bleaching in 2016 and 2017. There was an increase in grief-related responses and decline in self-efficacy, which could inhibit individual action. However, there was also an increase in protective sentiments, ratings of place values and the proportion of respondents who viewed climate change as an immediate threat. These results suggest that imperilled icons have potential to mobilize public support around addressing the wider threat of climate change but that achieving and sustaining engagement will require a strategic approach to overcome self-efficacy barriers.

Similar content being viewed by others

When, where, and which climate activists have vandalized museums

Lily Kinyon, Nives Dolšak & Aseem Prakash

Experience exceeds awareness of anthropogenic climate change in Greenland

Kelton Minor, Manumina Lund Jensen, … Minik T. Rosing

Building eco-surplus culture among urban residents as a novel strategy to improve finance for conservation in protected areas

Minh-Hoang Nguyen & Thomas E. Jones

Global warming threatens ecosystems and societies globally. However, in many countries public attitudes and perceptions of climate risks have lagged behind the accumulation of scientific evidence and assessments, contributing to inadequate political support for mitigation or adaptation 1 , 2 , 3 . As the risks and costs of climate change will increase the longer mitigation is delayed 4 , there is a need to understand barriers to public engagement with the issue and support for public action, including drivers of risk perceptions.

Many contextual and cultural factors can influence individuals’ climate change beliefs and attitudes, including value orientations, social identity and group norms 5 . While acceptance of the scientific consensus on human-induced climate change has been identified as an important ‘gateway belief’ to increased support for climate actions 6 , simply presenting more scientific facts to a sceptical or unengaged audience can be ineffective and even counterproductive 7 . Changing attitudes, beliefs and value orientations requires both cognitive and affective engagement (that is, reasoned understanding combined with emotional consequence), with emotion regarded to have the greater influence 3 , 8 , 9 . Yet failure to elicit an affective response to the threat of climate change is common among climate and behaviour change campaigns 10 . Part of this problem is a widespread perception that climate change is an abstract threat, with distant impacts that are presumed to affect other people, in other places at a future time 11 , 12 , 13 .

Research that seeks to understand the processes by which climate change risks become more salient to people has become an important field of enquiry. Climate change awareness and risk perceptions can be influenced through affective stimuli and the emotional responses associated with the perceived threat of loss or harm to oneself and/or things that are valued 5 , 14 . The effectiveness of emotional appeals and of evoking specific emotions to promote public engagement in environmental issues and behaviour change is an ongoing subject of scholarly debates 15 . Discrete emotions that have been identified as strongly associated with increased support for climate change policy include worry, interest and hope 14 . Eliciting fear can result in attitudinal changes and motivate new behaviours in response to a perceived threat 15 , 16 ; however, fear has also been shown to negatively influence engagement with the climate change issue and is considered detrimental to self-efficacy (the belief in one’s ability to affect change) 9 , 14 , 17 .

One approach to fostering improved engagement with climate change is the use and portrayal of icons. Icons are potent in their appeal to personal values and emotions; as such, they play an important role in representing climate change 18 , 19 . Iconic entities, including various animals, plants, natural and human-made landmarks, landscapes and ecosystems are symbolic, highly valued in numerous ways, and are synonymous with national and cultural identities 20 . Climate icons have been defined as “tangible entities which will be impacted by climate change, which the viewer considers worthy of respect, and to which the viewer can relate and feel empathy” 17 . Studies on the affective appeal of climate icons have used focus groups and workshops to identify characteristics that contribute to higher engagement 9 , 17 , 18 . However, affective responses associated with a large-scale climate impact to an iconic entity have not previously been documented.

In addition, an emerging body of literature on the ‘science of loss’ has highlighted an increasing need for research that explains the range of human values associated with the natural world, and how these values are endangered by a changing climate 21 , 22 . While the prospect of icons becoming damaged or degraded might prompt evaluations of tangible and direct economic losses, there are many intangible and non-economic values for icons that are likely to remain insufficiently accounted for (for example, cultural, lifestyle, health and identity values) 22 . The incomplete recognition of these intangible values, and of how heterogeneous communities will be affected by an icon’s loss or damage, increases the risk of failure to anticipate limits to adaptation, and to distinguish between acceptable, tolerable and intolerable outcomes 22 , 23 .

The Great Barrier Reef (GBR) is an iconic ecosystem and is regarded as Australia’s ‘most inspiring’ icon 24 . It is part of the national cultural identity and its UNESCO World Heritage status is a source of pride for most Australians 24 , 25 . Place attachment, pride and place values (for example, aesthetic, biodiversity, scientific heritage and lifestyle values) for the GBR extend to communities of stakeholders internationally 26 , 27 and contribute to the GBR’s appeal as an international tourism attraction 28 . Physical and aesthetic attributes of the GBR that motivate tourists to visit and that contribute to their satisfaction with reef-based activities (for example, snorkelling, scuba diving and wildlife watching), include the perception of healthy corals, abundant fish and clear water 29 . Tourism has become the GBR’s largest direct economic contributor, providing more than 58,000 sectoral jobs (full-time equivalent) and generating an estimated AUD$5.7 billion annually; the GBR’s total economic, social and icon asset value has been estimated at AUD$56 billion 30 .

However, the GBR faces multiple, cumulative threats, including climate change, and its long-term outlook has been assessed as poor and getting worse 31 . The 2016 marine heatwave caused the most intense coral bleaching observed on the GBR and resulted in an estimated 29–30% loss of shallow coral cover 32 . The following summer, unprecedented back-to-back coral bleaching caused an estimated 20% of additional coral mortality 33 . Most of the severe bleaching occurred in the northern half of the GBR Marine Park, affecting many tourism sites in the Cairns region 34 . Additionally, in March 2017, a severe tropical cyclone damaged reef and island tourism sites in the Whitsundays region 35 . Future projections of heat stress under a business-as-usual scenario (representative concentration pathway RCP 8.5) represent an existential threat to the GBR and to coral reefs globally, with severe coral bleaching expected to occur annually from the mid-2040s (ref. 36 ).

News of impacts to the GBR over 2016–2017 were reported internationally and a large proportion of those media stories were sensationalized and fatalistic in their messaging 37 . There were concerns that this negative media coverage would lead to a decline in tourist visits to the region 38 and propagate perceptions that no effective action to save the GBR is possible 37 . Records of visits to the GBR indicate that general decline in tourist visits has not yet occurred 39 ; instead, there has been an increase in ‘last chance tourism’, characterized by the motivation to see an iconic place (or species) before it is gone or permanently changed 40 .

In this study, we present results from surveys of 4,681 tourists (53% Australian and 47% international) who visited the GBR region before and after the events of 2016–2017 described above (see Methods ). We show that imperilled icons can contribute to proximizing the climate change issue across scales by comparing tourists’ affective responses and place values associated with an icon, their perceptions of threats to those values and their protective sentiment and self-efficacy, before (2013, n  = 2,877) and after (2017, n  = 1,804) the icon was subjected to a large-scale climatic impact.

Emotional responses to the GBR

We found a significant increase in the use of negatively valenced emotional words from 2013 to 2017 in response to the open-ended question, “what are the first words that come to mind when you think about the GBR?” (Fig. 1a,b ). In particular, words associated with sadness (for example, ‘fragile’ and ‘disappointing’), disgust (for example, ‘pollution’ and ‘ruined’), anger (for example, ‘destruction’ and ‘damage’) and fear (for example, ‘change’ and ‘danger’) increased significantly, while words evoking neutral or positive emotions did not change (Fig. 1c ). We compared the use of emotive words provided by tourists who had visited the GBR ( n  = 3,121) with words of those who had not visited the GBR at the time they were surveyed ( n  = 1,560). There was no difference in the use of such words between the two groups (Fig. 1c ), suggesting that the emotive response was not dependent on personal experience and observation of GBR impacts.

a , b , Visual comparisons of “the first words that come to mind when you think of the GBR” among tourists in the GBR region in 2013 ( n  = 2,877) ( a ) and 2017 ( n  = 1,804) ( b ). The size of words represents the relative frequency of responses. Words with positive and negative valence are coloured in blue and red, respectively. Neutral words are shown in grey. Words occurring fewer than three times are omitted. c , Mean change in occurrence of positive (blue), negative (red) and neutral (grey) emotions associated with responses from 2013 to 2017 in respondents who had visited the GBR ( n  = 3,121) compared with those who had not ( n  = 1,560). Error bars show 95% confidence intervals. Changes in the occurrence of specific emotions are significant if the confidence interval does not overlap with the 2013 (zero) baseline.

Elements of the negative emotional content of responses in 2017 (Fig. 1b,c ) were consistent with ‘ecological grief’, characterized as “the grief felt in relation to experienced or anticipated ecological losses, including the loss of species, ecosystems and meaningful landscapes due to acute or chronic environmental change” 41 . Sadness, anger and fear are common emotional reactions to many different types of loss, contributing to diverse grief responses 42 . Disgust is a primitive behaviour-influencing emotion that also occurs in a variety of contexts, including in response to politically oriented stimuli 43 . Ecological grief is increasingly being recognized among the unquantified and intangible costs of ecological losses associated with the Anthropocene 41 , 44 , 45 . A related study reported ‘reef grief’ as a response to the 2016–2017 GBR coral bleaching event among local coastal residents and tourists, and found that ratings of place attachment, place identity, place-based pride, lifestyle dependence and derived wellbeing are associated with stronger expressions of ecological grief 46 . Our results here (Fig. 1 ) provide further insights into the emotional manifestation of ecological grief in this context. As non-local actors, tourists would not normally be considered to have strong lifestyle dependence on the destinations and attractions they visit; however, their place attachment for an icon such as the GBR can still be strong 25 , 26 and they are vulnerable to experiencing grief in response to the icon’s loss or damage.

Threat perceptions and climate change attitudes

In short, open-ended responses to the question “what do you think are the three most serious threats to the GBR?”, the proportion of respondents identifying climate change increased from 40% of respondents in 2013 to 51% in 2017, making climate change the most frequently cited threat overall in 2017 (Fig. 2a ). In comparison, in 2013 the most commonly identified threat to the GBR was tourism (43% of respondents), which dropped to third-ranked in 2017 (27% of respondents). The pollution category included a wide range of responses (for example, litter, marine debris and urban pollutants) and was identified in 2017 by 50% of respondents. In 2017, pollution ranked second: up from being ranked third in 2013 at 30%, potentially reflecting an increased awareness of the threat of marine debris. The other category that displayed a notable increase was effects of humanity (9% in 2013 to 24% in 2017), which included responses such as overpopulation, human activity and anthropogenic threats. Coral bleaching was cited by 8% of respondents in both years; however, its ranking relative to other perceived threats increased from eleventh in 2013 to ninth in 2017.

a , The percentages of tourists in 2013 ( n  = 2,877) and 2017 ( n  = 1,804) who identified specific threats among their perceived “three most serious threats to the GBR”. The top 12 response themes are shown for each group. b , The percentages of tourists in 2013 ( n  = 2,877) and 2017 ( n  = 1,804) choosing each of five statements to represent their awareness and attitude towards climate change.

Public perceptions of environmental risks and threats are shaped by social, cultural and psychological processes, and the exchange of information about ‘risk events’ can amplify (or attenuate) public responses to a risk or threat 47 . Symbols and imagery portraying risk events further interact with these processes in ways that can intensify risk perceptions 48 . Public awareness and perceptions of threats facing the GBR have evolved in recent decades and media representations of threats and risk events are considered to have had influence 37 , 49 . Ironically, tourists perceive their own activities as a dominant impact at ecologically sensitive sites 50 . The presence of other tourists, associated infrastructure and localized site degradation are often the only pressures and impacts readily visible and identifiable at tourist sites, thus influencing visitors’ wider threat perceptions 51 . While tourism has not been recognized in any recent scientific literature as among the most serious threats to the GBR, our results suggest that in 2013 many GBR tourists were probably unaware of the level of risk associated with other, scientifically recognized, threats such as climate change; and that any effects that could be attributed to such threats were less (or were not) visible to GBR tourists at that time.

There was a marked increase from 2013 to 2017 in the proportion of tourists who reported their acceptance that “climate change is an immediate threat requiring action” (56 to 73%; Fig. 2b ). While this proportion for international tourists (increasing from 64% in 2013 to 78% in 2017) was higher than that for Australians (increasing from 50% in 2013 to 67% in 2017), the magnitude of this increase in both groups towards recognition of the climate change threat, its immediacy and the need for action, represents a substantial shift in normative attitudes toward climate change at a scale and in a timeframe not reported in previous studies. Previous annual surveys of Australian attitudes towards climate change, over the period from 2010 to 2014, showed that while the attitudes of individuals fluctuated, the aggregate levels of opinion remained stable over that time 52 . Whether the observed changes in 2017 represent a reaction at a moment in time or a lasting change in attitudes is uncertain and further work is needed to determine whether these perceptions have become normalized in the wider population.

While we cannot conclusively attribute the cause of this attitudinal change to the GBR coral bleaching events, we believe that a strong influence and ‘risk amplification’ was likely, considering the scale of the event, its extensive media coverage that explicitly attributed the events to climate change 37 , associated imagery, as well as the direct observation of affected reef sites by many tourists who visited the GBR over this time. While the more sensationalized and fatalistic media stories of the coral bleaching events and the GBR’s imperilled status have been criticized for their potential to cause public disengagement and a loss of hope in mitigation actions 37 , the broader exchange of information precipitated by this risk event may have had positive outcomes on public threat awareness (Fig. 2a ) and support for mitigative action (Fig. 2b ).

Personal experience and perceptions

We found significant declines in tourists’ perceptions of the GBR’s aesthetic beauty, their overall satisfaction with their experience of the GBR (among those who had visited) and in their ratings of the quality of reef tourism activities (among those who had participated; Table 1a ). While the 2017 mean scores remained relatively high on a 10-point scale (ranging between 7.46 and 8.52), there is an inherent positivity bias associated with tourist satisfaction ratings and relatively small changes can signal a qualitative distinction 53 .

The aesthetic appreciation of natural settings is a fundamental way in which people relate to the environment, and aesthetic perceptions play a critical role in the satisfaction that tourists derive from places 54 . In a coral reef setting, physical attributes that have been correlated quantitatively with non-expert ratings of aesthetic beauty include water clarity, fish abundance and ‘coral topography’ (the complexity of coral formations and features); however, many more visual and sensory attributes contribute to people’s overall aesthetic appraisal 54 . Imagery associated with the mass coral bleaching events was widely featured in media articles, in which aerial and underwater scenes of white, pale and fluorescent corals were often depicted (for example, see the March 2017 cover of Nature 55 ). Such imagery is visually striking, and scenes of bleached coral gardens can even be considered beautiful 56 . Such scenes are typically short-lived: once mortality occurs, brown algae quickly smothers coral skeletons 57 . While the biological process of coral bleaching is complex and its explanation is technical, the imagery from the event may have been highly engaging to non-expert audiences, overcoming barriers that have been associated with ‘expert’ conceptualizations of climate change threats and impacts 18 .

At the time of the 2017 tourist survey (July–August), bleached coral was still present in low levels; however, mortality associated with the 2016 coral bleaching event had already occurred from Cairns to the far north of the GBR, and cyclone-damaged reefs and islands in the Whitsundays region had not recovered 58 . We therefore consider that a substantial proportion of the 1,076 respondents who had visited the GBR when surveyed in 2017 probably had personally experienced and observed affected areas, influencing their aesthetic perceptions and satisfaction. However, as noted above, the personal observation of impacts on the GBR was not a requisite for recalling a negative emotional response to the GBR (Fig. 1c ).

Effects on place values, pride and identity

Understanding place values, which represent the estimated worth and meaning of a place, is important for environmental management and decision making 59 , 60 . We found that strong, shared values for an icon are responsive to ecosystem disturbances and threats. In contrast with the declines in ratings of GBR perceptions and the tourist experience reported above, we found small but significant increases from 2013 to 2017 in ratings of values attributed to the GBR, including its biodiversity value, scientific and education value, lifestyle value and international icon value. Similarly, pride and identity associated with the GBR were significantly higher in 2017 (Table 1b ). Pride in the GBR and GBR identity were positively correlated with these cultural values attributed to the GBR (see Table 2 ). Place values, such as those recorded for the GBR’s biodiversity, scientific heritage and lifestyle values, are consistently strong among diverse stakeholder groups (geographically proximate and distal alike), whereas greater variability is expressed for pride and identity 27 , consistent with the lower mean scores for GBR identity among tourists (Table 1b ).

We propose that these increased ratings for (or expressions of) place values, identity and pride are complementary to the expression of ecological grief (representing ‘ecological empathy’), and form part of the holistic affective response to an imperilled climate icon. Empathy for nature stems from a recognition of its intrinsic value and a feeling of connectedness to it (for example, pride and identity) 61 and the desire to protect the environment has been proposed as an extension of Maslow’s ‘values of being’ in the self-actualization process 61 . Knowing that such values can change in response to environmental change highlights a need for their continued assessment. As loss and ecological grief are expected to become increasingly common responses to climate impacts 21 , 41 , the health literature on cumulative trauma suggests that ‘compassion fatigue’ 62 and the erosion of ecological empathy (or ‘environmental numbness’) 63 may occur.

Protective sentiment and self-efficacy

While protective sentiment associated with the GBR increased significantly in 2017, including tourists’ willingness to act and willingness to learn (Table 1c ), there was a corresponding decline in self-efficacy, represented here by capacity to act and optimism for the future of the GBR. The slight increase in ratings for sense of agency and opportunity to act indicates some self-awareness of the individual’s role in mitigating threats. However, the corresponding decline in sense of individual responsibility suggests that community expectations of responsibility and capacity for addressing great threats such as climate change are located in the actions of governments and corporations, rather than their own actions.

Conclusions

Our study identified a clear affective response amongst tourists, whose protective sentiment for the GBR became heightened after a notable climate impact, while their sense of self-efficacy diminished. Concomitant with grief-associated emotive responses (sadness, anger and fear; Fig. 1c ), respondents expressed empathy for the icon through increased ratings of place values, identity and protective sentiment (Table 1a,b ).

While our study is limited to tourists, we note that they represent diverse national and international stakeholder interests, attitudes and values, from widespread places of origin. Their affective responses in this case were not dependent on visits to the GBR and personal experience of impacts (Fig. 1c ), indicating other contributing influences; for example, sensationalized media representations 37 and imagery of the coral bleaching event. This suggests that representations of icons like the GBR, when subject to a high-profile risk event, can elicit wide-reaching affective responses, amplify risks and proximize the climate change issue. However, like other examples of the iconic approach for representing climate change 9 , 18 , the observed decline in self-efficacy represents a barrier to productive engagement in mitigative actions. In particular, the expression of fear (Fig. 1c ) and the observed decline in individual sense of responsibility (Table 1c ) may be indicative of the perceived scale of the climate threat and the intractability of the problem through individual efforts alone. Nonetheless, the expressions of protective sentiment in this context suggest a significant potential to mobilize public support around addressing threats to icons, like the GBR, where opportunities for individual action are linked to a broader, collective response.

From an action perspective, our findings can be considered both potentially constraining (due to reduced self-efficacy) and enabling (due to increased protective sentiment). Management, scientific or conservation agencies that seek to engage communities in climate mitigation and adaptation may arouse high levels of interest and empathy by using evocative imagery of icons during crises or high-profile events. However, achieving and sustaining engagement in collective action will require a more strategic and thoughtful approach to overcome efficacy barriers. Prevailing over such barriers can potentially be achieved by drawing on lessons from health and psychology literature, including, for example, the ‘small changes’ approach 64 , positive affirmation and promotion of incremental successes 65 , and fostering pride in pro-environmental behaviours 66 . Maintaining hope, balanced with clear and accessible actions linked to attainable goals, also remains critical to motivating people and sustaining their engagement in collective efforts to restore, mitigate and adapt 63 , 67 .

Engaging with loss and grief represents an additional challenge that requires sensitivity. An understanding of shared place values provides an important basis for constructive engagement with the possibility of loss, and appealing to such values can empower communities and motivate cooperation to offset potentially harmful outcomes 21 , 22 . However, it is important to recognize that wider place values are heterogeneous, that some may be in conflict, and that respectful, transparent dialogue provides the best avenue to negotiate areas of contention 68 .

Our study provides insights into some of the shared place values assigned to the GBR among one, albeit diverse, non-local stakeholder group. As a multiple-use marine park and World Heritage area, with adjacent coastal communities dependent on tourism, fishing, agriculture and mining (among other industries), and with cross-scale communities deriving wellbeing from a broad range of cultural and ecosystem services, the GBR represents an important example among climate icons that encapsulates a multiplex of human values that are challenged by climate change. Like other natural World Heritage-listed sites, the full extent of cultural and other intangible values that are at stake in the GBR remains poorly understood 31 . Research to describe the diversity and importance of human values associated with iconic places that are vulnerable to loss is needed, as a precursor to predicting how such values might respond to future losses, to guide coordinated responses to the climate threat and to mitigate potential suffering from future impacts 21 , 22 .

Survey design

To measure and compare tourists’ perceptions and values of the GBR and protective sentiments for the GBR, we used a series of statements from an established framework for monitoring human–environment cultural and place values 27 and asked survey respondents to indicate their level of agreement/disagreement on a 10-point scale (1 = very strongly disagree; 10 = very strongly agree). Similarly, we asked respondents who had visited the GBR to provide ratings of their satisfaction (1 = extremely dissatisfied; 10 = extremely satisfied) and the quality of popular reef-based activities (1 = very low quality; 10 = very high quality) if they had undertaken them during their visit. Climate change threat awareness and perceptions were elicited by asking respondents to select one statement from five options that best reflected their viewpoint: (1) “climate change is an immediate threat requiring action”, (2) “climate change is a serious threat but the impacts are too distant for immediate concern”, (3) “I need more evidence to be convinced of the problem”, (4) “I believe that climate change is not a threat at all” and (5) “I do not have a view on climate change”. To elicit threat perceptions, respondents were asked to list what they thought were the “three most serious threats to the GBR” in a short, open-ended format. While some minor changes were made to the overall survey instrument between 2013 and 2017, the questions used for our analyses in this study remained identical.

Data collection

Tourists in the GBR region (defined as the GBR catchment, bounded by Cape York in the north, Bundaberg in the south and the Great Dividing Range in the west) were surveyed using face-to-face interviews between June and August in both 2013 and 2017 (ref. 69 ). For the purposes of this study we defined tourists broadly as non-resident visitors to the GBR region. The surveys were conducted at 14 regional population centres along the coast, in public locations such as beaches, boat ramps, parks, shopping centres and markets, and on a limited number of GBR tourism vessels. Interviews were conducted by trained survey staff, and responses were entered in situ into tablet computers, using the iSurvey application. In 2013, we achieved a sample of 2,877 tourists (1,557 of whom were Australian, 1,286 from overseas and 34 respondents who did not provide their place of origin), followed by a sample of 1,804 tourists in 2017 (831 Australian, 805 from overseas and 168 respondents who did not provide their place of origin). Our sampling strategy used a combination of convenience and quota sampling 70 , to minimize potential biases for gender, age and nationality. However, a limitation of the study was its availability in English only, and we acknowledge that some non-English-speaking tourist market segments are under-represented (for example, tourists from China). This research involving human participants was reviewed and approved by the CSIRO Social Science Human Research Ethics Committee and was conducted in accordance with the Australian National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research (2007). All respondents gave informed consent to participate in the voluntary survey.

Description of sample

The demography and location of origin for both domestic and international tourists was comparable between years; however, in 2017, the mean age of domestic tourists was lower than that for 2013 (43.5 ± 0.45 yr compared with 48.9 ± 0.64 yr respectively). A higher proportion of females was represented among the international tourists in both years (55% of our sample in 2013 and 57% in 2017). Overseas respondents came from 54 countries in our 2013 sample and 35 countries in our 2017 sample. Most international respondents came from Europe and North America, with the largest proportions originating from the United Kingdom (25% in 2013 and 19% in 2017), Germany (18% in 2013 and 19% in 2017), France (12% in 2013 and 11% in 2017) and the United States (8% in 2013 and 11% in 2017). Most domestic tourists were repeat visitors to the GBR region (77% in both years), while most international tourists were first-time visitors to the region (84% in 2013 and 86% in 2017). Among domestic tourists, 58% in both years had visited the GBR during their stay in the region; among international tourists, 85% had visited the GBR in 2013 and 67% had visited the GBR in 2017. The number of responses ( n ) varied for some of the survey questions (for example, ratings of the quality of scuba diving, snorkelling and wildlife watching were limited to respondents who had participated in those activities); where relevant, these differing sample sizes are shown (Table 1 ), with accompanying standard errors for mean scores.

Statistical analyses of numeric data

We used MS Excel and SPSS (v.22) software for analyses of numeric data (providing means and comparing the distribution of rating scores for a range of 10-point scaled response questions, as described above). Non-parametric Mann–Whitney U-tests (Table 1 ) and Spearman’s rho correlation tests (Table 2 ) were used, as the appropriate statistical tools for ordinal (10-point rating scale) data 71 . Effect sizes ( r ) were calculated manually from the SPSS output z value using: \(r = \frac{z}{{\sqrt {\mit{n}} }}\) .

Word–emotion analysis and word clouds

Our first question in the survey asked, in an open-ended short response format: “what are the first words that come to mind when you think about the GBR?” Responses were cleaned (correcting spelling, removing punctuation and stop words) and their association with eight core emotions theorized by R. Plutchik (fear, anger, joy, sadness, trust, disgust, anticipation and surprise) 72 were scored on a binary scale (0 = not associated, 1 = associated) using the National Research Council of Canada Word–Emotion Association Lexicon (EmoLex) 73 . EmoLex is a large, high-quality, word–emotion lexicon in which more than 14,000 English unigrams (nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs) and 25,000 word senses were manually annotated by crowdsourcing 74 , noting that multiple emotions can be evoked simultaneously by the same word. We then calculated, for each emotion, the difference in average occurrence (±95% confidence interval) between 2017 and 2013.

To produce the word-cloud visualizations showing basic emotional valence/sentiment associated with words/terms (positive or negative valence shown in blue and red, respectively; Fig. 1a,b ), we adapted EmoLex to account for the contextual relevance of particular words used when referring to a coral reef ecosystem. We removed words that otherwise would have been identified as negatively valenced (for example ‘cold’, ‘sharks’ and ‘wild’) or positively valenced (for example ‘hot’ and ‘warm’) outside this context. New words that we categorized as positively valanced included ‘diversity’, ‘life’, ‘icon’, ‘pristine’, ‘heritage’, ‘colours’, ‘relaxing’, ‘sunshine’, ‘biggest’, ‘vast’, ‘biodiversity’, ‘natural’, ‘nature’, ‘colourful’, ‘unique’, ‘holiday’, ‘holidays’ and ‘relax’. New words/terms that we identified as negatively valanced included ‘bleaching’, ‘bleached’, ‘climate change’, ‘coal’, ‘endangered’, ‘oil’, ‘pollution’ and ‘threatened’. Analyses were done using the {tm} and {syuzhet} packages (for text mining and cleaning and for the word–emotion and word cloud/sentiment analyses, respectively) in R.

Coding of threats

Respondents were asked “what do you think are the three most serious threats to the GBR” in a short open-ended response format. Ranking of the listed threats by respondents was not taken into account. Responses were cleaned and then sorted into main categories, using MS Excel, with coding checked by at least two researchers. Responses in the pollution category included marine debris, beach litter and a range of other contributors, as well as the generic term ‘pollution’. The water quality category included agricultural as well as urban and industrial runoff, sediments and pesticides, while coastal development encompassed port developments, dredging and other industrial activities. The fishing category included all extractive activities, commercial and recreational, illegal foreign fishing and ‘overfishing’ in general. The shipping category included oil spills and ballast water/pollution from shipping. The natural disasters category included responses such as storm damage, cyclones, floods, tsunamis and earthquakes. The climate change category included global warming, rising temperatures (sea and air) and sea level rise. Coral bleaching was coded separately, as was ocean acidification. While climate change, coral bleaching and ocean acidification are related, separate coding of the three terms was considered appropriate. Broad-scale (‘mass’) coral bleaching events result from heat stress, including the recent GBR events, and have been attributed scientifically to climate change 58 , 75 . However, coral bleaching can occur as a result of multiple non-climate change pressures, such as fresh-water inundation and overexposure to direct sunlight 57 . Further to this, heat-stress-induced coral bleaching is only one potential effect (or ‘symptom’) of climate change. Increased storm intensity and/or frequency (physical damage) and sea-level rise (reduced water quality and reef drowning) are other pressures affecting coral reefs that are linked to climate change 76 . Acidification, while associated with climate change as another consequence of increased atmospheric CO 2 absorbed by the ocean, is regarded as a separate driver of many (different) pressures affecting marine ecosystems 76 .

Reporting Summary

Further information on research design is available in the Nature Research Reporting Summary linked to this article.

Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study (SELTMP 2013; 2017) 69 are publicly available from the CSIRO online data access portal at https://doi.org/10.25919/5c74c7a7965dc . The R code used in this study is available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Lee, T. M., Markowitz, E. M., Howe, P. D., Ko, C. & Leiserowitz, A. A. Predictors of public climate change awareness and risk perception around the world. Nat. Clim. Change 5 , 1014–1020 (2015).

Article   Google Scholar  

Lacey, J., Howden, M., Cvitanovic, C. & Colvin, R. M. Understanding and managing trust at the climate science–policy interface. Nat. Clim. Change 8 , 22–28 (2018).

Lorenzoni, I., Nicholson-Cole, S. & Whitmarsh, L. Barriers perceived to engaging with climate change among the UK public and their policy implications. Glob. Environ. Change 17 , 445–459 (2007).

Rogelj, J., McCollum, D. L., Reisinger, A., Meinshausen, M. & Riahi, K. Probabilistic cost estimates for climate change mitigation. Nature 493 , 79–83 (2013).

van der Linden, S. L. The social–psychological determinants of climate change risk perceptions: towards a comprehensive model. J. Environ. Psychol. 41 , 112–124 (2015).

van der Linden, S. L., Leiserowitz, A. A., Feinberg, G. D. & Maibach, E. W. The scientific consensus on climate change as a gateway belief: experimental evidence. PLoS ONE 10 , e0118489 (2015).

Wynne, B. Creating public alienation: expert cultures of risk and ethics on GMOs. Sci. Cult. 10 , 445–481 (2001).

Article   CAS   Google Scholar  

Wood, W. Attitude change: persuasion and social influence. Annu. Rev. Psychol. 51 , 539–570 (2000).

O’Neill, S., Boykoff, M., Neimeyer, S. & Day, S. A. On the use of imagery for climate change engagement. Glob. Environ. Change 23 , 413–421 (2013).

Ockwell, D., Whitmarsh, L. & O’Neill, S. Reorienting climate change communication for effective mitigation: forcing people to be green or fostering grass-roots engagement? Sci. Commun. 30 , 305–327 (2009).

Myers, T. A., Maibach, E. W., Roser-Renouf, C., Akerlof, K. & Leiserowitz, A. A. The relationship between personal experience and belief in the reality of global warming. Nat. Clim. Change 3 , 343–347 (2013).

Singh, A. S., Zwickle, A., Bruskotter, J. T. & Wilson, R. The perceived psychological distance of climate change impacts and its influence on support for adaptation policy. Environ. Sci. Policy 73 , 93–99 (2017).

Scannell, L. & Gifford, R. Personally relevant climate change: the role of place attachment and local versus global message framing in engagement. Environ. Behav. 45 , 60–85 (2013).

Smith, N. & Leiserowitz, A. The role of emotion in global warming policy support and opposition. Risk Anal. 34 , 937–948 (2014).

Skurka, C., Niederdeppe, J., Romero-Canyas, R. & Acup, D. Pathways of influence in emotional appeals: benefits and tradeoffs of using fear or humor to promote climate change-related intentions and risk perceptions. J. Commun. 68 , 169–193 (2018).

Milne, S., Sheeran, P. & Orbell, S. Prediction and intervention in health-related behaviour: a meta-analytic review of protection motivation theory. J. Appl. Soc. Psychol. 30 , 106–143 (2000).

O’Neill, S. & Nicholson-Cole, S. “Fear Won’t Do It”: promoting positive engagement with climate change through visual and iconic representations. Sci. Commun. 30 , 355–379 (2009).

O’Neill, S. J. & Hulme, M. An iconic approach for representing climate change. Glob. Environ. Change 19 , 402–410 (2009).

Höijer, B. Emotional anchoring and objectification in the media reporting on climate change. Public Underst. Sci. 19 , 717–731 (2010).

Edensor, T. National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life (Bloomsbury, 2002).

Barnett, J., Tschakert, P., Head, L. & Adger, W. N. A science of loss. Nat. Clim. Change 6 , 976–978 (2016).

Tschakert, P. et al. Climate change and loss, as if people mattered: values, places, and experiences. WIREs Clim. Change 8 , e476 (2017).

Dow, K. et al. Limits to adaptation. Nat. Clim. Change 3 , 305–307 (2013).

Goldberg, J. et al. Climate Change, the Great Barrier Reef and the response of Australians. Palgrave Commun. 2 , 15046 (2016).

Marshall, N. A. et al. The dependency of people on the Great Garrier Reef, Australia. Coast. Manag. 45 , 505–518 (2017).

Gurney, G. G. et al. Redefining community based on place attachment in a connected world. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 114 , 10077–10082 (2017).

Marshall, N. et al. Measuring what matters in the Great Barrier Reef. Front. Ecol. Environ. 16 , 271–277 (2018).

Coghlan, A. Linking natural resource management to tourist satisfaction: a study of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. J. Sustain. Tour. 20 , 41–58 (2012).

Esparon, M., Stoeckl, N., Farr, M. & Larson, S. The significance of environmental values for destination competitiveness and sustainable tourism strategy making: insights from Australia’s Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area. J. Sustain. Tour. 23 , 706–725 (2015).

At What Price? The Economic, Social and Icon Value of the Great Barrier Reef (Great Barrier Reef Foundation, 2017).

Great Barrier Reef Outlook Report 2014 (Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, 2014).

Final Report: 2016 Coral Bleaching Event on the Great Barrier Reef (Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, 2017).

James, L. E. Half the Great Barrier Reef is dead. National Geographic Magazine (August 2018); https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/08/explore-atlas-great-barrier-reef-coral-bleaching-map-climate-change/

Reef Health (Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, 2019); http://www.gbrmpa.gov.au/the-reef/reef-health

Chen, D. Cyclone Debbie leaves Whitsunday Islands reefs in ruins. ABC News (9 April 2017); https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-09/cyclone-debbie-leaves-whitsundays-reefs-in-ruins/8428866

Heron, S. F. et al. Impacts of Climate Change on World Heritage Coral Reefs: A First Scientific Assessment (UNESCO World Heritage Centre, 2017); https://whc.unesco.org/en/news/1676/

Eagle, L., Hay, R. & Low, D. R. Competing and conflicting messages via online new media: potential impacts of claims that the Great Barrier Reef is dying. Ocean Coast. Manag. 158 , 154–163 (2018).

Willacy, M. Great Barrier Reef coral bleaching could cost $1b in lost tourism, research suggests. ABC News (21 June 2016); https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-06-21/reef-bleaching-could-cost-billion-in-lost-tourism/7526166

Annual Report 2017–2018 (Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, 2018).

Piggott-McKellar, A. E. & McNamara, K. E. Last chance tourism and the Great Barrier Reef. J. Sustain. Tour. 25 , 397–415 (2016).

Cunsolo, A. & Ellis, N. R. Ecological grief as a mental health response to climate change-related loss. Nat. Clim. Change 8 , 275–281 (2018).

Archer, J. The Nature of Grief (Routledge, 1999).

Smith, K. B., Oxley, D., Hibbing, M. V., Alford, J. R. & Hibbin, J. R. Disgust sensitivity and the neurophysiology of left-right political orientations. PLoS ONE 6 , e25552 (2011).

Head, L. The Anthropoceneans. Geogr. Res. 53 , 313–320 (2015).

Adger, W. N., Barnett, J., Brown, K., Marshall, N. & O’Brien, K. Cultural dimensions of climate change impacts and adaptation. Nat. Clim. Change 3 , 112–117 (2013).

Marshall, N. et al. Reef grief: investigating the relationship between place meanings and place change on the Great Barrier Reef, Australia. Sustain. Sci. 14 , 579–587 (2019).

Kasperson, R. E. et al. The social amplification of risk: a conceptual framework. Risk Anal. 8 , 177–187 (1988).

Kasperson, J. X., Kasperson, R. E., Pidgeon, N. & Slovic, P. in The Social Amplification of Risk (eds Pidgeon, N. et al.) Ch. 1 (Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Lankester, A. J., Bohensky, E. & Newlands, M. Media representations of risk: the reporting of dredge spoil disposal in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park at Abbot Point. Mar. Policy 60 , 149–161 (2015).

Prideaux, B., McNamara, K. E. & Thompson, M. The irony of tourism: visitor reflections of their impacts on Australia’s World Heritage rainforest. J. Ecotourism 11 , 102–117 (2012).

Hillery, M., Nancarrow, B., Griffin, G. & Syme, G. Tourist perception of environmental impact. Ann. Tour. Res. 28 , 853–867 (2001).

Leviston, Z., Greenhill, M. & Walker, I. Australian Attitudes to Climate Change and Adaptation: 2010–2014 (CSIRO, 2015).

Pearce, P. L. in Managing Tourism and Hospitality Services: Theory and International Applications (eds Prideaux, B. et al.) Ch. 25 (CABI, 2006).

Marshall, N. et al. Identifying indicators of aesthetics in the Great Barrier Reef for the purposes of management. PLoS ONE 14 , e0210196 (2019).

Nature 543 , 7645 (2017).

Pocock, C. Sense matters: aesthetic values of the Great Barrier Reef. Int. J. Herit. Stud. 8 , 365–381 (2002).

Brown, B. E. Coral bleaching: causes and consequences. Coral Reefs 16 , S129–S138 (1997).

Hughes, T. P. et al. Global warming transforms coral reef assemblages. Nature 556 , 492–496 (2018).

Ives, C. D. & Kendal, D. The role of social values in the management of ecological systems. J. Environ. Manag. 144 , 67–72 (2014).

Kenter, J. O. et al. What are shared and social values of ecosystems? Ecol. Econ. 111 , 86–99 (2015).

Kuhn, J. L. Toward and ecological humanistic psychology. J. Humanist. Psychol. 41 , 9–24 (2001).

Figley, C. R. (ed.) Compassion Fatigue: Coping with Secondary Traumatic Stress Disorder in Those Who Treat the Traumatized (Routledge, 1995).

Gifford, R. The dragons of inaction: psychological barriers that limit climate change mitigation and adaptation. Am. Psychol. 66 , 290–302 (2011).

Hill, J. O., Wyatt, H. R., Reed, G. W. & Peters, J. C. Obesity and the environment: where do we go from here? Science 299 , 853–855 (2003).

Epton, T. & Harris, P. R. Self-affirmation promotes health behaviour change. Health Psychol. 27 , 746–752 (2008).

Harth, N. S., Leach, C. W. & Kessler, T. Guilt, anger, and pride about in-group environmental behaviour: different emotions predict distinct intentions. J. Environ. Psychol. 34 , 18–26 (2013).

Hobbs, R. J. Grieving for the past and hoping for the future: balancing polarizing perspectives in conservation and restoration. Restor. Ecol. 21 , 145–148 (2013).

Chapin, F. S. & Knapp, C. N. Sense of place: a process for identifying and negotiating potentially contested visions of sustainability. Environ. Sci. Policy 53 , 38–46 (2015).

Marshall, N., et al. Social and Economic Long Term Monitoring Program (SELTMP) for the Great Barrier Reef Data. v1 (CSIRO, 2019); https://doi.org/10.25919/5c74c7a7965dc .

Bryman, A. Social Research Methods 4th edn (Oxford Univ. Press, 2012).

Fritz, C. O., Morris, P. E. & Richler, J. J. Effect size estimates: current use, calculations, and interpretation. J. Exp. Psychol. 141 , 2–18 (2012).

Plutchik, R. A psychoevolutionary theory of emotions. Soc. Sci. Inf. 21 , 529–553 (1982).

Mohammad, S. M. & Turney, P. D. Emotions evoked by common words and phrases: using Mechanical Turk to create an emotion lexicon. In Proc. NAACL HLT 2010 Workshop on Computational Approaches to Analysis and Generation of Emotion in Text , 26–34 (Association for Computational Linguistics, 2010).

Mohammad, S. M. & Turney, P. D. Crowdsourcing a word–emotion association lexicon. Comput. Intell. 29 , 436–465 (2012).

Hughes, T. P. et al. Global warming and recurrent mass bleaching of corals. Nature 543 , 373–377 (2017).

Spillman, C. M., Heron, S. F., Jury, M. R. & Anthony, K. R. N. Climate change and carbon threats to coral reefs. Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc. 92 , 1581–1586 (2011).

Download references

Acknowledgements

This study was conducted using data from the Social and Economic Long-Term Monitoring Program for the Great Barrier Reef (SELTMP: https://research.csiro.au/seltmp/ ) with funding provided by the Australian and Queensland Governments as part of the Reef 2050 Integrated Monitoring and Reporting Program (2017–2019) and the Australian Government’s National Environmental Research Program, Tropical Ecosystems Hub (2011–2015). S.F.H. was supported by National Oceanic and Atmospheric (NOAA) grant (no. NA14NES4320003) (Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites) at the University of Maryland/ESSIC. The scientific results and conclusions, as well as any views or opinions expressed herein, are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Australian Government, the Minister for the Environment, the Queensland Government, NOAA or the US Department of Commerce.

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

CSIRO Land and Water, James Cook University, Townsville, Queensland, Australia

Matthew I. Curnock, Nadine A. Marshall, Scott F. Heron, Genevieve Williams, Petina L. Pert & Jeremy Goldberg

National Center for Scientific Research, PSL Université Paris, CRIOBE USR3278 CNRS-EPHE-UPVD, Paris, France

Lauric Thiault

Laboratoire d’Excellence CORAIL, Papetoai Moorea, French Polynesia

Coral Reef Watch, US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, College Park, MD, USA

Scott F. Heron

Marine Geophysical Laboratory, Physics, College of Science and Engineering, James Cook University, Townsville, Queensland, Australia

Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, Townsville, Queensland, Australia

Jessica Hoey & Genevieve Williams

CSIRO Land and Water, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

Bruce Taylor

College of Business, Law and Governance, James Cook University, Townsville, Queensland, Australia

Jeremy Goldberg

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Contributions

N.A.M., M.I.C., P.L.P., J.G. and others designed the research and collected data. M.I.C., L.T., G.W. and N.A.M. analysed the data. M.I.C., N.A.M., L.T., S.F.H., J.H., B.T., P.L.P. and J.G. wrote the paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Matthew I. Curnock .

Ethics declarations

Competing interests.

The authors declare no competing interests.

Additional information

Peer review information: Nature Climate Change thanks Karen McNamara, Nick Pidgeon and other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

Publisher’s note: Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Supplementary information

Rights and permissions.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article.

Curnock, M.I., Marshall, N.A., Thiault, L. et al. Shifts in tourists’ sentiments and climate risk perceptions following mass coral bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef. Nat. Clim. Chang. 9 , 535–541 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-019-0504-y

Download citation

Received : 11 December 2018

Accepted : 10 May 2019

Published : 24 June 2019

Issue Date : July 2019

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-019-0504-y

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

This article is cited by

Broad values as the basis for understanding deliberation about protected area management.

• Devin J. Goodson
• Carena J. van Riper
• Christopher M. Raymond

Sustainability Science (2024)

Climate Change and Travel: Harmonizing to Abate Impact

• Aisha N. Khatib

Current Infectious Disease Reports (2023)

Public perceptions of marine environmental issues: A case study of coastal recreational users in Italy

• Serena Lucrezi

Journal of Coastal Conservation (2022)

Ocean Warming Will Reduce Standing Biomass in a Tropical Western Atlantic Reef Ecosystem

• Leonardo Capitani
• Júlio Neves de Araujo
• Guilherme O. Longo

Ecosystems (2022)

Ecosystem response persists after a prolonged marine heatwave

• Robert M. Suryan
• Mayumi L. Arimitsu
• Stephani G. Zador

Scientific Reports (2021)

Quick links

• Explore articles by subject
• Guide to authors
• Editorial policies

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Alternative Tourism in Turkey pp 35–53 Cite as

Tourism and Sustainability in Turkey: Negative Impact of Mass Tourism Development

• Istvan Egresi 3  
• First Online: 09 December 2016

1152 Accesses

4 Citations

Part of the book series: GeoJournal Library ((GEJL,volume 121))

Mass tourism has played a critical role in Turkey’s strategy for economic development. However, mass tourism development has not been without costs. This chapter will critically examine the impact of mass tourism on destination areas in Turkey. This chapter argues that tourists tend to consume more vital resources than local people and generate more waste and pollution. We also found that local people have benefited very little from tourism development. The main benefit for them is the provision of jobs, but most of these are seasonal, part-time, low-skilled, and low-paying. Tourism has also brought them higher prices and a de facto segregation from tourists in the coastal areas, where they appear to have lost the right to access beaches and other coastal lands which used to be public in the past but seem to be reserved for tourists nowadays.

• Water Consumption
• Electricity Consumption
• Tourism Industry
• Tourism Development
• International Tourist

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution .

Buying options

• Available as PDF
• Read on any device
• Instant download
• Own it forever
• Available as EPUB and PDF
• Compact, lightweight edition
• Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
• Free shipping worldwide - see info
• Durable hardcover edition

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Average water consumption is 140 L per person, per day, in rural areas and 250 L in urban areas (EEA 2001 ).

Total water consumption by the tourism industry in Alanya has increased from 4.6 billion liters in 2002 to 6.1 billion liters in 2008 (Tosun and Caliskan 2011 ).

Water consumption per guest, per day, in a five-star hotel is at least double compared to that in a two-star hotel. The share of five-star hotels in total water consumption of the tourism industry in Alanya is 34 %, and the share of four-star hotels is 11 % (Tosun and Caliskan 2011 ).

Besides the direct use of water in tourism, the indirect use of water is also very important—for example, for the preparation of food; with the increased preference for all-inclusive, this is projected to increase (Hadjikakou et al. 2013 ; Tortella and Tirado 2011 ).

The Blue Flag is a certification by the Foundation for the Environmental Education (FEE) that a beach meets its (high) standards for water quality and safety.

To be fair, we should note that, more often than not, the development of coastal mass tourism leads to an increase in the development gap between the coastal and the inland regions, especially in the developing nations. Andriotis ( 2006 ), for example, has reported a very similar situation on the island of Crete (Greece), where most development has taken place along the coast (stimulated by mass tourism), while the interior of the island is still used mainly for agriculture.

It is estimated that approximately 20 km 2 of agricultural lands have been lost in Alanya alone to tourism development (Tosun and Caliskan 2011 ).

Akkemik, K. A. (2012). Assessing the importance of international tourism for the Turkish economy: A social accounting matrix analysis. Tourism Management, 33 , 790–801.

Article   Google Scholar  

Alipour, H. (1996). Tourism development within planning paradigms: The case of Turkey. Tourism Management, 17 (5), 367–377.

Altunel, E., & Hancock, P. L. (1994). Pollution of the Pamukkale travertine as a consequence of urbanisation: What future for a unique natural Turkish Monument? 47 Turkiye Jeoloji Kurultayi 1994 Bildiri Ozleri; Cevre Jeolojisi Oturumu . Izmir: Dokuz Eylul Universitesi.

Google Scholar  

Alvarez, M., & Korzay, M. (2011). Turkey as a heritage tourism destination: The role of knowledge. Journal of Hospitality Marketing and Management, 20 , 425–440.

Amelung, B., & Viner, D. (2006). Mediterranean tourism: Exploring the future with the tourism climatic index. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 14 (4), 349–366.

Andriotis, K. (2006). Researching the development gap between the hinterland and the coast: Evidence from the island of Crete. Tourism Management, 27 , 629–639.

Antakyali, D., Krampe, J., & Steinmetz, H. (2008). Practical application of waste-water reuse in tourist resorts. Water Science and Technology, 57 , 2051–2057.

Bianchi, R. V. (2004). Tourism restructuring and the politics of sustainability: A critical view from the European periphery (the Canary Islands). Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 12 (6), 495–529.

Blue Plan. (2012). Seaside tourism and urbanization: Environmental impact and land issues. Blue Plan notes: Environment and development in the Mediterranean, May 21.

Briassoulis, H. (2002). Sustainable tourism and the question of the commons. Annals of Tourism Research, 29 (4), 1065–1085.

Briassoulis, H. (2007). Golf-centered development in coastal Mediterranean Europe: A soft sustainability test. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 15 (5), 441–462.

Buhalis, D. (2000). Relationships in the distribution channel of tourism: Conflicts between hoteliers and tour operators in the mediterranean region. International Hospitality, Leisure and Tourism Administration Journal, 1 (1), 113–139.

Burak, S., Dogan, E., & Gazioglu, C. (2004). Impact of urbanization and tourism on coastal environment. Ocean and Coastal Management, 47 , 515–527.

Butler, R. W. (1980). The concept of a tourist area cycle of evolution: Implications for management of resources. The Canadian Geographer, 24 (1), 5–12.

Çetinel, F., & Yolal, M. (2009). Public policy and sustainable tourism in Turkey. Tourismos: An International Multidisciplinary Journal of Tourism, 4 (3), 35–50.

Claver-Cortes, E., Molina Azorin, F., & Pereira-Moliner, J. (2007). Competitiveness in mass tourism. Annals of Tourism Research, 34 (3), 727–745.

De Stefano, L. (2004). Freshwater and tourism in the Mediterranean . Rome: WWF Mediterranean Program. www.panda.org/Mediterranean

Duman, T., & Tosun, C. (2010). Current developments in Turkish tourism. Anatolia: An International Journal of Tourism and Hospitality Research, 21 (1), 5–9.

Duzgunoglu, E., & Karabulut, E. (1999). Development of turkish tourism: Past and present. Istanbul: TURSAB (Association of Turkish Travel Agencies).

EEA. (2001). Environmental signals . Copenhagen: European Environmental Agency. http://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/signals-2001/page000.html

EEA. (2003). Europe’s water: An indicator-based assessment . Topic report No. 1, European Environmental Agency. http://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/topic_report_2003_1

Egresi, I., Bayram, B., Kara, F., & Kesik, O. A. (2012). Unlocking the potential of religious tourism in Turkey. GeoJournal of Tourism and Geosites, 5 (1), 63–80.

Erdogan, N., & Baris, E. (2007). Environmental protection programs and conservation practices of hotels in Ankara, Turkey. Tourism Management, 28 , 604–614.

Eroglu, T. (1995). Yuksek okul adina yapilan konusmalar. In Kapadokya Toplantilari II: Turizm Endustrisi—Turizm Isletmeciligive Otelcilik Yukesek Okulu Isbirligi Imkanlari (pp. 30–33).

EurActive. (2010). Turk Turizmi Ekonomik Krizden Neden Daha Az Etkilendi? http://www.euractive.com.tr

Gezici, F. (2006). Components of sustainability: Two cases from Turkey. Annals of Tourism Research, 32 (2), 442–455.

Gezici, F., Yazgan Gül, A., & Alkay, E. (2006). Analyzing coastal development pattern of tourism in Turkey. 46th Congress of European Regional Science Association, 30 August–3 September, Volos, Greece.

Gossling, S. (2001). The consequences of tourism for sustainable water use on a tropical island: Zanzibar, Tanzania. Journal of Environmental Management, 61 , 179–191.

Gossling, S. (2006). Tourism and water. In S. Gossling & C. M. Hall (Eds.), Global environmental change, ecological, social, economic and political interrelationships (pp. 180–194). Abingdon: Routledge.

Gossling, S., Peeters, P., Hall, C. M., Cevon, J.-P., Dubois, G., Lehmann, L., et al. (2012). Tourism and water use; supply, demand and security: An international review. Tourism Management, 33 , 1–15.

Göymen, K. (2000). Tourism and governance in Turkey. Annals of Tourism Research, 22 , 1025–1048.

Hadjikakou, M., Chenoweth, J., & Miller, G. (2013). Estimating the direct and indirect water use of tourism in the Eastern Mediterranean. Journal of Environmental Management, 114 , 548–556.

Kaya, Z., & Raynal, D. J. (2001). Biodiversity and conservation of turkish forests. Biological Conservation, 97 (2), 131–141.

Kaya, L. G., & Smardon, R. (2000). Sustainable tourism development: The case of Antalya, Turkey. In Proceedings of the Northeastern recreation symposium, Bolton Landing, New York, USA (pp. 222–228).

Kent, M., Newham, R., & Essex, R. (2002). Tourism and sustainable water supply in Mallorca: A geographical analysis. Applied Geography, 22 , 351–374.

Kocasoy, G. (1989). The relationship between coastal tourism, sea pollution and public health: A study case from Turkey. Environmentalist, 9 (4), 245–251.

Kuvan, Y. (2005). The use of forests for the purpose of tourism: The case of Belek Tourism Center in Turkey. Journal of Environmental Management, 75 , 263–274.

Kuvan, Y. (2010). Mass tourism development and deforestation in Turkey. Anatolia: An International Journal of Tourism and Hospitality Research, 21 (1), 155–168.

Kuvan, Y., & Akan, P. (2005). Residents’ attitudes toward general and forest-related impacts of tourism: The case of Belek, Antalya. Tourism Management, 26 , 691–705.

Medeazza, G. M. (2004). Water desalination as a long-term sustainable solution to alleviate global freshwater scarcity: A north-south approach. Desalination, 169 , 287–301.

Okumus, F., Avci, U., Kilic, I., & Walls, A. R. (2012). Cultural tourism in Turkey: A missed opportunity. Journal of Hospitality Marketing and Management, 21 (6), 638–658.

Okumuş, F., & Karamustafa, K. (2005). Impact of an economic crisis: Evidence from Turkey. Annals of Tourism Research, 32 (4), 942–961.

Ozden, S., Atmis, E., & Menemencioglu, K. (2004). Negative effects and recent unplanned expansion on highland ecosystems in Turkey. Mountain Research and Development, 24 (4), 303–306.

Perry, A. (2006). Will predicted climate change compromise the sustainability of Mediterranean tourism? Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 14 (4), 367–375.

Reid, D. G. (2003). Tourism, globalization and development: Responsible tourism planning . London: Pluto Press.

Sabban, M. (2013). Report on sustainable tourism in the Mediterranean. Assemble Regionale et Locale Eyru-Mediterraneene—Euro Mediterranean Regional and Local Assembly (ARLEM). http://cor.europa.eu/en/activities/arlem/activities/meetings/Documents/sudev-report2012-tourism-en.pdf

Sari, D., Ozkurt, N., Hamamci, S.F., Ece, M., Yalcindag, N., Akdag, A., et al. (2014). Assessment of noise pollution sourced from entertainment places in Antalya, Turkey. Inter-noise conference proceedings, November 16–19, Melbourne, Australia. http://www.acoustics.asn.au/conference_proceedings/INTERNOISE2014/papers/p141.pdf

Scoullos, M. J. (2003). Impact of anthropogenic activities in the coastal region of the mediterranean sea. In International Conference on the Sustainable Development of the Mediterranean and Black Sea Environment, May, Thessaloniki, Greece.

Seckelmann, A. (2002). Domestic tourism—A chance for regional development in Turkey? Tourism Management, 23 , 85–92.

Shaw, G., & Agarwal, S. (2007). Introduction: The development and management of coastal resorts: A global perspective. In S. Agarwal & G. Shaw (Eds.), Managing coastal tourism resorts: A global perspective (pp. 1–20). Clevedon: Channel View Publications.

Sönmez, S., & Sirakaya, E. (2002). A distorted destination image? The case of Turkey. Journal of Travel Research, 41 , 185–196.

Tavmergen, I. G., & Oral, S. (1999). Tourism development in Turkey. Annals of Tourism Research, 26 (2), 451–453.

Tezcan, B. (2004). Developing alternative modes of tourism in Turkey (M.A. Thesis), Middle Eastern Technical University, Ankara, Turkey.

Tortella, B. D., & Tirado, D. (2011). Hotel water consumption at a seasonal mass tourist destination. The case of the island of Mallorca. Journal of Environmental Management, 92 , 2568–2579.

Tosun, C. (1998). Roots of unsustainable tourism development at the local level: The case of Urgup in Turkey. Tourism Management, 19 (6), 595–610.

Tosun, C. (1999). An analysis of contributions of international inbound tourism to the Turkish economy. Tourism Economics, 5 (3), 217–250.

Tosun, C. (2001). Challenges of sustainable tourism development in the developing world: The case of Turkey. Tourism Management, 22 , 289–303.

Tosun, C. (2002). Host perceptions of impacts of tourism: A comparative tourism study. Annals of Tourism Research, 29 , 231–253.

Tosun, C., & Caliskan, C. (2011). An analysis for achieving a better level of sustainable tourism development at local scale . Sophia Antipolis: Plan Bleu.

Tosun, C., Okumus, F., & Fyall, A. (2008). Marketing philosophies: Evidence from Turkey. Annals of Tourism Research, 35 (1), 127–147.

Tosun, C., & Timothy, D. (2001). Shortcomings in planning approaches to tourism development in developing countries: The case of Turkey. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 13 , 352–359.

Tosun, C., Timothy, D. J., & Öztürk, Y. (2003). Tourism growth, national development and regional inequality in Turkey. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 11 (2–3), 133–161.

Tosun, C., Timothy, D. J., & Öztürk, Y. (2004). Tourism growth, national development and regional inequality in Turkey. In B. Bramwell (Ed.), Coastal mass tourism: Diversification and sustainable development in Southern Europe (pp. 85–113). Clevedon: Channel View Publications.

Tucker, H. (2010). Peasant entrepreneurship, a longitudinal ethnography. Annals of Tourism Research, 37 (4), 927–946.

Var, T. (2001). The state, the private sector, and the tourism policies in Turkey. In Y. Apostopoulos, P. Loukisas, & L. Leontidou (Eds.), Mediterranean tourism: Facets of socioeconomic development and cultural change (pp. 91–111). London: Routledge.

Williams, S. (2009). Tourism geography: A new synthesis . London: Routledge.

Yarcan, S. (2007). Coping with continuous crises: The case of Turkish inbound tourism. Middle Eastern Studies, 43 (5), 779–794.

Yüksel, F., Bramwell, B., & Yüksel, A. (1999). Stakeholder interviews and tourism planning at Pamukkale, Turkey. Tourism Management, 20 (3), 351–360.

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Department of Geography, Fatih University, 34500, Buyukcekmece, Istanbul, Turkey

Istvan Egresi

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Istvan Egresi .

Editor information

Editors and affiliations.

Department of Geography, Fatih University, Istanbul, Turkey

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2016 Springer International Publishing AG

About this chapter

Cite this chapter.

Egresi, I. (2016). Tourism and Sustainability in Turkey: Negative Impact of Mass Tourism Development. In: Egresi, I. (eds) Alternative Tourism in Turkey. GeoJournal Library, vol 121. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47537-0_3

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47537-0_3

Published : 09 December 2016

Publisher Name : Springer, Cham

Print ISBN : 978-3-319-47535-6

Online ISBN : 978-3-319-47537-0

eBook Packages : Social Sciences Social Sciences (R0)

Share this chapter

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Publish with us

Policies and ethics

• Find a journal
• Track your research

• Get in touch
• Visit our blog

10 must-read articles on the destructive force of mass tourism

Topic: sustainable tourism + visitor experience.

• Recent Posts

• World’s most sustainable city? Copenhagen and its impact on travellers - 5 December 2023
• Capital of the future? Valencia leaps ahead with sustainable ambitions - 28 November 2023
• How travel can meet carbon zero goals by 2030 - 17 October 2023

22 August 2016

0 comments(s).

Destinations around the world are under increasing pressures due to exponential growth in visitation. The negative effects of mass tourism are being felt in idyllic locations prized for pristine landscapes and also in cities, where the quality of life of residents is being negatively impacted by the growing foot traffic.

These 10 must-read articles shed light on how increased crowds and consumption may affect your own destination and how governments and their citizens are responding.

Image credit: Kristin Klein, Flickr

1. New Zealand – Ban freedom camping, impose bed tax on tourists

This article underscores the need to nurture natural environments while embracing the economic benefits of tourism. Damage inflicted along the foreshore of Lake Pukaki in particular has resulted in calls for a tourist tax in New Zealand.

2. Taxing tourists to save our species

41 percent of visitors to New Zealand come primarily for nature experiences. As a result, a tax on tourism is proposed to not only protect New Zealand’s natural environment but its endangered species.

3. Iceland plans Airbnb restrictions amid tourism explosion

There is a move in Iceland to tax people who rent out properties through Airbnb. Officials and residents have expressed concerns over housing affordably caused by increased tourist numbers.

4. Berlin Has Banned Airbnb

Under a new law called “Zweckentfremdungsverbot,” Berlin has made it illegal for tourists to rent apartments in the city through Airbnb. The aim is to protect affordable housing for residents.

5. One of Thailand’s Most Beautiful Islands Is Being Closed Before Tourists Ruin It Forever

Koh Tachai in Thailand’s Ranong Province is being closed to prevent further damage by tourists. The closure of the island is designed to give the land and marine environments time to regenerate.

6. Japan wants ‘Chinese-only’ zones at tourist attractions to limit bad behavior

The reported behaviour of Chinese tourists during Japan’s cherry blossom season has resulted in calls for “Chinese-only” zones to limit the damage some claim these tourists are prone to causing.

7. Is mass tourism destroying our cities? Bye Bye Barcelona documentary investigates

The way of life for many residents in Barcelona is being altered as their neighbourhoods suffer from overcrowding caused by tourism.

8. Mallorca graffiti fury: ‘Tourists go home. Refugees welcome’

There is an increasingly negative view of tourism on the holiday island of Mallorca. This is due to holidaymakers crowding into the Balearic capital, which locals claim is destroying neighbourhoods.

9. Backpacker, Go Home: How Tourism Is Ruining Everything

Here’s a provocative look at how mass tourism is destroying the atmosphere of some of world’s most pristine and culturally significant locations.

10. Mounting opposition to Bali mass tourism project

The anti-reclamation movement in Bali has gone mainstream, with 28 villages opposing the Benoa Bay tourism development project. This reflects the wider sentiment of the negative effects of mass tourism on Bali’s natural landscapes and way of life.

Is your destination facing challenges like these? Many destination marketers have identified the need to balance profit and planet as a critical problem for our time. Read about today’s four critical destination marketing trends as the industry seeks to solve problems together.

Submit a Comment Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Submit Comment

RELATED POSTS

Truth and visitation: How exposing painful histories through travel can bring healing

Feb 6, 2024

“I can share the history without laying guilt, shame, or blame, and I can turn it around and use it in the work...

From ice rink to green oasis: Food security and sovereignty in the North

Nov 7, 2023

“You're in Inuvik, the sun's been down for a month. You're two degrees above the Arctic Circle, and it's minus 35 this...

Inuvik, NWT: Indigenous leadership and stewardship in the face of climate change

Oct 26, 2023

"There's a lot of things that I believe Inuvik and the Beaufort Delta could teach the world. First and foremost is...

You’ve found your partner for destination marketing

We work with the most innovative tourism boards in the world to create a vision for each of their destinations, solve business challenges and execute brilliant, integrated campaigns. The expertise we apply to that work is shared in the articles published here and in our DMO Matters newsletter.

Consent* Destination Think may store my data and contact me by email.*

Thank you! You will receive an email to confirm your subscription.

We value and respect your privacy. Click to read our privacy policy.

‘Tourists ask a lot of questions’: Great Barrier Reef guides face up to bleaching tragedy

Tour boat divers have long borne witness to mass bleaching events. Once reluctant to wade into discussions about global heating, they are now opening up

• Get our morning and afternoon news emails , free app or daily news podcast

“You can see it on their faces,” says scuba diving instructor Elliot Peters. “There’s definitely some remorse and sadness.”

Peters works at a resort on Heron Island in the southern part of the Great Barrier Reef and, in recent weeks, he’s had to tell curious guests why so many of the corals around the island are turning bone white.

The reef is in the middle of its fifth mass bleaching event in only eight years – an alarming trend driven by global heating in a year that has seen record global ocean temperatures.

Peters has never seen a mass coral bleaching event up close before, but this summer he’s seen ancient boulder corals that can live for hundreds of years bleaching and showing signs of death.

“If anything it’s motivating me,” he says. “It’s opening the doors to get people talking about climate change and the health of the reef. People are thanking us for telling the truth about what’s going on here.”

The Great Barrier Reef is a major export industry for Australia, with one 2017 report estimating the reef supports 64,000 jobs and contributes $6.4bn to the national economy.

But as the impact of global heating on the reef made global headlines in 2016 and 2017, tensions in the tourism industry started to emerge. One tourism head called stories of catastrophic bleaching a “great white lie”.

“The reef is the most significant natural attraction that this country has to offer,” says Daniel Gschwind, a professor at Griffith University’s tourism institute and the chair of the committee that represents reef tourism to the government’s Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority.

“It’s a challenge because as a phenomenon, [global heating] is affecting what we ultimately sell.”

Sign up for a weekly email featuring our best reads

‘If the reef dies, we die’

Gschwind says for many years, tourism operators were reluctant to talk to guests about the threat of climate breakdown.

The reef has experienced mass bleaching in 2002, 2016, 2017, 2020, 2022 and now again in 2024. But for an ecosystem the size of Italy, the effects are not uniform.

What is coral bleaching?

Coral bleaching describes a process where the coral animal expels the algae that live in their tissues and give them their colour and much of their nutrients.

Without their algae, a coral’s white skeleton can be seen through their translucent flesh, giving a bleached appearance.

Mass coral bleaching over large areas, first noticed in the 1980s around the Caribbean, is caused by rising ocean temperatures.

Some corals also display fluorescent colours under stress when they release a pigment that filters light. Sunlight also plays a role in triggering bleaching.

Corals can survive bleaching if temperatures are not too extreme or prolonged.  But extreme marine heatwaves can kill corals outright.

Coral bleaching can also have sub-lethal effects, including increased susceptibility to disease and reduced rates of growth and reproduction.

Scientists say the gaps between bleaching events are becoming too short to allow reefs to recover.

Coral reefs are considered one of the planet’s ecosystems most at risk from global heating. Reefs support fisheries that feed hundreds of millions of people, as well as supporting major tourism industries.

The world’s biggest coral reef system – Australia’s Great Barrier Reef – has suffered seven mass bleaching events since 1998, of which five were in the past decade. 

In any given year, some reefs escape the heat stress, some turn white but then regain their colour, while some corals will die. Bleaching can make corals more susceptible to disease, slow their growth and impede their reproduction.

Government scientists were this week carrying out in-water and aerial surveys to assess the bleaching across the whole reef, but it could be weeks, or even months, before there’s a clear picture of how severe this year has been.

The long-term prognosis for the reef is not good. As global heating continues, the chances of ever more intense heat stress events is rising.

“It’s difficult to communicate a bleaching event accurately,” says Gschwind. “With an event like this one, by the time it’s communicated to a consumer in London or Shanghai the message received could be ‘the reef is not worth visiting any more’. That’s the challenge to the tourism industry and it’s why many operators struggle with this.”

Divers on tourism boats are often the first to raise the alarm, and this year operators have sent more than 5,000 observations to the marine park authority.

“That’s where the industry and operators see their social role. They’re the communicators of this story – operators are the sentinels,” says Gschwind.

“They see what global warming is doing to the natural environment that we all depend on. If the reef dies, then we die. We’re the early warning system for what’s going on on the planet.”

The emotional toll of a bleached reef

Since back-to-back mass bleaching events in 2016 and 2017, the park authority has worked with the tourism industry to establish Master Reef Guides, a growing cohort of more than 120 dive professionals trained by scientists and traditional owners on how to communicate the health of the reef and its threats.

Fiona Merida, a marine biologist and director of reef education and engagement at the park authority, says giving tourism operators detailed information on what was happening at the sites they visited “takes the emotion out of it” and gives them confidence to talk to visitors about bleaching.

But she says some reef guides are themselves suffering “ecological grief” this year at seeing the places they love suffer. Reef guides have established a “buddy check” system where guides can check in on each other’s mental health.

Yolanda Waters is founder of advocacy group Divers for Climate and has been diving in the southern section of the reef in recent weeks.

after newsletter promotion

“It was bleached coral as far as the eye could see,” she says. “I didn’t want to get back into the water. It’s a restorative place for me and to not want to go back in is awful.”

Waters is a former dive instructor and as part of research at the University of Queensland , she has interviewed more than 650 reef visitors in recent years.

“I noticed how difficult these conversations were,” she says. “Tourists ask a lot of questions and it can feel confronting if people have paid $300 to go on to the reef. A big question tourism gets asked is: ‘Is the reef dying? Tell me.’

“The reality is far more complicated, but they want to know from the people who see the reef every day.

“We found [tourists] are actually open to hearing about climate change. In fact the majority weren’t only open to the information, but wanted more. And they wanted to know what they could do.”

“It’s a tricky line: how do we do this in a way that motivates action and does not turn people off? But you have to face the reality – there is still so much to save, and that gets left out a lot.”

‘The time is now’

Tahn Miller has been working as a dive instructor and guide at Wavelength Reef Cruises in Port Douglas in far north Queensland for 15 years.

Miller remembers hearing stories from a decade ago of how some dive guides in other parts of the reef would be told not to mention climate change to guests for fear of perpetuating ideas the natural treasure was either dying or not worth visiting.

But he says there’s been an evolution in the industry, and now far more divers are feeling empowered to talk to visitors about the climate crisis – but only if the visitors want to hear it.

“You have climate sceptics in every group, but I find that’s becoming less and less,” he says. “I tell them I’m not there to change anyone’s minds, but this is what I have witnessed. I try and be honest with them.”

Miller says after the 2016 bleaching, he saw reefs recovering. But his optimism has been eroded in recent years.

There are several tour operators that are also running small reef restoration projections in the areas they visit, including replanting corals.

“Some of the corals I’ve planted – hundreds of them – have already died [this summer],” he says.

“The time is now … we have to make change because if we don’t, we lose massive expanses of reef.”

Back on Heron Island, Peters says he gets stopped by tourists asking him what they can do to help the reef.

“I start by getting them to acknowledge their appreciation for the reef and that we have to do more. I leave them with one or two tips,” he says.

“I say they should ‘use their voice’ and find out about the policies of the people they might vote for. And I ask them to think about where their money is being held – is it in a bank that invests in fossil fuels?”

• Great Barrier Reef
• Climate crisis
• Marine life

Most viewed

The problem with making all academic research free

A new funding model for journals could deprive the world of valuable research in the humanities and social sciences..

There has been an earthquake in my corner of academia that will affect who teaches in prestigious universities and what ideas circulate among educated people around the world.

And it all happened because a concept rooted in good intentions — that academic research should be “open access,” free for everyone to read — has started to go too far.

The premise of open-access publishing is simple and attractive. It can cost libraries thousands of dollars a year to subscribe to academic journals, which sometimes means only academics affiliated with wealthy colleges and universities may access that research. But under open-access publishing, nearly anyone with an internet connection can find and read those articles for free. Authors win, because they find more readers. Academics around the world benefit, because they can access the latest scholarship. And the world wins, because scientific and intellectual progress is facilitated by the free exchange of ideas.

By now this model has taken hold in the natural sciences, especially in biology and biomedicine; during the pandemic many publishers removed paywalls from articles about vaccines and treatments. The Biden administration requires federally funded scholarly publications to be made freely available without any delay.

Advertisement

However, there is no such thing as a free academic article. Even with digital distribution, the expenses of running a journal are considerable. These costs include hosting the websites where people submit, peer-review, and edit articles; copyediting; advertising; preserving journal archives; and maintaining continuity as editors come and go.

As a result, unless journals have a source of revenue other than subscription fees, any move toward open access raises the question of who will cover the costs of publication.

One answer is that the money will come from authors themselves or their academic institutions or other backers. This works well enough in the natural sciences, because those researchers are often funded by grants, and some of that money can be set aside to cover a journal’s fees for publishing scientific articles. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation demands that all research funded by the foundation, including the underlying data, be published open access.

According to a paper published in Quantitative Science Studies , however, only a small fraction of scholars in the humanities publish their articles on an open-access basis. Unlike biologists and biomedical engineers, humanities scholars such as philosophers and historians do not get grants that can cover the publishing costs.

This means that if open access is to take hold in those fields as well — as many publishers and academics are advocating — the costs will have to be covered by some foundation or other sponsor, by the scholars’ institutions, or even by the scholars themselves. And all these models have serious downsides.

I’m a political philosopher. The earthquake in my field that I mentioned earlier shook one of our most prominent journals: the Journal of Political Philosophy.

Publishing an article in this journal has long made the difference between whether a candidate gets hired, tenured, or promoted at an elite institution of higher education. The high quality has stemmed in large part from the rigorous approach of the founding editor, Robert Goodin.

At the end of 2023, the publisher, Wiley, terminated its contract with Goodin. The reasons were not immediately clear, and over 1,000 academics, including me, signed a petition stating that we would not serve on the editorial board or write or review for the journal until Wiley reinstates Goodin. I recently attended a panel at an American Philosophical Association conference where philosophers voiced their anger and puzzlement about the situation.

One source of the problem appears to be that Wiley now charges the authors of an article or their institutions $3,840 to get published open access in the journal.

The Journal of Political Philosophy is actually hybrid open access, which means it waives the article processing charges for authors who permit their work to appear behind a subscription-only paywall. Nonetheless, Goodin and Anna Stilz , a Princeton professor and Journal of Political Philosophy editorial board member, point out that publishers like Wiley now have a strong incentive to favor open-access articles.

In the old model, in which university libraries subscribed to journals, editors were mainly incentivized to publish first-rate material that would increase subscriptions. In the open-access model, however, now that authors or their universities must cover the costs of processing articles, publishers of humanities journals seem to be incentivized to boost revenue by accepting as many articles as possible. According to Goodin , open access has “been the death knell of quality academic publishing.” The reason that Goodin lost his job, Goodin and Stilz imply, is that Wiley pressured Goodin to accept more articles to increase Wiley’s profits, and he said no. (Wiley representatives say that lines of communication had collapsed with Goodin.)

Early this year, Goodin cofounded a new journal titled simply Political Philosophy . The journal will be published by the Open Library of Humanities, which is subsidized by libraries and institutions around the world. But this version of open-access publishing does not have the financial stability of the old subscription model. Scholars affiliated with the Open Library of Humanities have pointed out that the project has substantial overhead costs, and it relied on a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that has already ended. The Open Library of Humanities is an experiment, and I hope that it works, but as of now it publishes only 30 journals , compared with the 1,600 journals that Wiley publishes.

The fact remains that no one has satisfactorily explained how open access could work in the humanities and social sciences.

In his 2023 book “ Athena Unbound : Why and How Scholarly Knowledge Should Be Free for All,” UCLA history professor Peter Baldwin attempts an answer. He points to Latin America, where some national governments cover all expenses of academic publishing. But this proposal ignores the fact that the governments of the United States and other nations probably do not want to pay for humanities and social sciences journals.

Baldwin also floats the idea of preprint depositories where academics could share documents on the cloud before they have undergone the (somewhat expensive) process of peer review. But this means that academics would lose the benefits that come from getting double-blind feedback from one’s peers. This idea would reduce the costs of publishing a journal article, but it would turn much academic writing into fancy blogging.

Ultimately, Baldwin’s solution is that authors might “have to participate directly, giving them skin in the game and helping contain costs.” This means academics might ask their employers to pay the article processing charges, ask a journal for the processing fees to be waived, or dig into their own pockets to pay to publish.

And it might mean less gets published overall. The journal Government and Opposition, published by Cambridge University Press, is entirely open access and charges $3,450 for an article to be published. I’d have to apply for a discount or a waiver to publish there. Or I could do what political philosophers in Japan and Bosnia and Herzegovina have told me they do: avoid submitting to open-access journals. Their universities will not cover their article processing charges except maybe in the top journals, and even the reduced fees can run into hundreds of dollars that these professors do not have.

In “Athena Unbound,” Baldwin notes that Harvard subscribes to 10 times as many periodicals as India’s Institute of Science. One can bemoan this fact, but one may also appreciate that Harvard’s largesse spreads enough subscription revenue around to reputable journals to enable academics to avoid paying to publish in them, no matter whether they teach at regional state schools, non-elite private schools, or institutions of higher education in poor countries. For all its flaws, the old model meant that when rich alumni donated to their alma maters, it increased library budgets and thereby made it possible for scholars of poetry and state politics to run and publish in academic journals.

Until we have more evidence that open-access journals in the humanities and social sciences can thrive in the long run, academics need to appreciate the advantages of the subscription model.

This article was updated on March 28 to correct the reference to the paper published in Quantitative Science Studies.

Nicholas Tampio is a professor of political science at Fordham University in New York City.

Globe Ideas

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

What the Data Says About Pandemic School Closures, Four Years Later

The more time students spent in remote instruction, the further they fell behind. And, experts say, extended closures did little to stop the spread of Covid.

By Sarah Mervosh ,  Claire Cain Miller and Francesca Paris

Four years ago this month, schools nationwide began to shut down, igniting one of the most polarizing and partisan debates of the pandemic.

Some schools, often in Republican-led states and rural areas, reopened by fall 2020. Others, typically in large cities and states led by Democrats, would not fully reopen for another year.

A variety of data — about children’s academic outcomes and about the spread of Covid-19 — has accumulated in the time since. Today, there is broad acknowledgment among many public health and education experts that extended school closures did not significantly stop the spread of Covid, while the academic harms for children have been large and long-lasting.

While poverty and other factors also played a role, remote learning was a key driver of academic declines during the pandemic, research shows — a finding that held true across income levels.

Source: Fahle, Kane, Patterson, Reardon, Staiger and Stuart, “ School District and Community Factors Associated With Learning Loss During the COVID-19 Pandemic .” Score changes are measured from 2019 to 2022. In-person means a district offered traditional in-person learning, even if not all students were in-person.

“There’s fairly good consensus that, in general, as a society, we probably kept kids out of school longer than we should have,” said Dr. Sean O’Leary, a pediatric infectious disease specialist who helped write guidance for the American Academy of Pediatrics, which recommended in June 2020 that schools reopen with safety measures in place.

There were no easy decisions at the time. Officials had to weigh the risks of an emerging virus against the academic and mental health consequences of closing schools. And even schools that reopened quickly, by the fall of 2020, have seen lasting effects.

But as experts plan for the next public health emergency, whatever it may be, a growing body of research shows that pandemic school closures came at a steep cost to students.

The longer schools were closed, the more students fell behind.

At the state level, more time spent in remote or hybrid instruction in the 2020-21 school year was associated with larger drops in test scores, according to a New York Times analysis of school closure data and results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress , an authoritative exam administered to a national sample of fourth- and eighth-grade students.

At the school district level, that finding also holds, according to an analysis of test scores from third through eighth grade in thousands of U.S. districts, led by researchers at Stanford and Harvard. In districts where students spent most of the 2020-21 school year learning remotely, they fell more than half a grade behind in math on average, while in districts that spent most of the year in person they lost just over a third of a grade.

( A separate study of nearly 10,000 schools found similar results.)

Such losses can be hard to overcome, without significant interventions. The most recent test scores, from spring 2023, show that students, overall, are not caught up from their pandemic losses , with larger gaps remaining among students that lost the most ground to begin with. Students in districts that were remote or hybrid the longest — at least 90 percent of the 2020-21 school year — still had almost double the ground to make up compared with students in districts that allowed students back for most of the year.

Some time in person was better than no time.

As districts shifted toward in-person learning as the year went on, students that were offered a hybrid schedule (a few hours or days a week in person, with the rest online) did better, on average, than those in places where school was fully remote, but worse than those in places that had school fully in person.

Students in hybrid or remote learning, 2020-21

80% of students

Some schools return online, as Covid-19 cases surge. Vaccinations start for high-priority groups.

Teachers are eligible for the Covid vaccine in more than half of states.

Most districts end the year in-person or hybrid.

Source: Burbio audit of more than 1,200 school districts representing 47 percent of U.S. K-12 enrollment. Note: Learning mode was defined based on the most in-person option available to students.

Income and family background also made a big difference.

A second factor associated with academic declines during the pandemic was a community’s poverty level. Comparing districts with similar remote learning policies, poorer districts had steeper losses.

But in-person learning still mattered: Looking at districts with similar poverty levels, remote learning was associated with greater declines.

A community’s poverty rate and the length of school closures had a “roughly equal” effect on student outcomes, said Sean F. Reardon, a professor of poverty and inequality in education at Stanford, who led a district-level analysis with Thomas J. Kane, an economist at Harvard.

Score changes are measured from 2019 to 2022. Poorest and richest are the top and bottom 20% of districts by percent of students on free/reduced lunch. Mostly in-person and mostly remote are districts that offered traditional in-person learning for more than 90 percent or less than 10 percent of the 2020-21 year.

But the combination — poverty and remote learning — was particularly harmful. For each week spent remote, students in poor districts experienced steeper losses in math than peers in richer districts.

That is notable, because poor districts were also more likely to stay remote for longer .

Some of the country’s largest poor districts are in Democratic-leaning cities that took a more cautious approach to the virus. Poor areas, and Black and Hispanic communities , also suffered higher Covid death rates, making many families and teachers in those districts hesitant to return.

“We wanted to survive,” said Sarah Carpenter, the executive director of Memphis Lift, a parent advocacy group in Memphis, where schools were closed until spring 2021 .

“But I also think, man, looking back, I wish our kids could have gone back to school much quicker,” she added, citing the academic effects.

Other things were also associated with worse student outcomes, including increased anxiety and depression among adults in children’s lives, and the overall restriction of social activity in a community, according to the Stanford and Harvard research .

Even short closures had long-term consequences for children.

While being in school was on average better for academic outcomes, it wasn’t a guarantee. Some districts that opened early, like those in Cherokee County, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta, and Hanover County, Va., lost significant learning and remain behind.

At the same time, many schools are seeing more anxiety and behavioral outbursts among students. And chronic absenteeism from school has surged across demographic groups .

These are signs, experts say, that even short-term closures, and the pandemic more broadly, had lasting effects on the culture of education.

“There was almost, in the Covid era, a sense of, ‘We give up, we’re just trying to keep body and soul together,’ and I think that was corrosive to the higher expectations of schools,” said Margaret Spellings, an education secretary under President George W. Bush who is now chief executive of the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Closing schools did not appear to significantly slow Covid’s spread.

Perhaps the biggest question that hung over school reopenings: Was it safe?

That was largely unknown in the spring of 2020, when schools first shut down. But several experts said that had changed by the fall of 2020, when there were initial signs that children were less likely to become seriously ill, and growing evidence from Europe and parts of the United States that opening schools, with safety measures, did not lead to significantly more transmission.

“Infectious disease leaders have generally agreed that school closures were not an important strategy in stemming the spread of Covid,” said Dr. Jeanne Noble, who directed the Covid response at the U.C.S.F. Parnassus emergency department.

Politically, though, there remains some disagreement about when, exactly, it was safe to reopen school.

Republican governors who pushed to open schools sooner have claimed credit for their approach, while Democrats and teachers’ unions have emphasized their commitment to safety and their investment in helping students recover.

“I do believe it was the right decision,” said Jerry T. Jordan, president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, which resisted returning to school in person over concerns about the availability of vaccines and poor ventilation in school buildings. Philadelphia schools waited to partially reopen until the spring of 2021 , a decision Mr. Jordan believes saved lives.

“It doesn’t matter what is going on in the building and how much people are learning if people are getting the virus and running the potential of dying,” he said.

Pandemic school closures offer lessons for the future.

Though the next health crisis may have different particulars, with different risk calculations, the consequences of closing schools are now well established, experts say.

In the future, infectious disease experts said, they hoped decisions would be guided more by epidemiological data as it emerged, taking into account the trade-offs.

“Could we have used data to better guide our decision making? Yes,” said Dr. Uzma N. Hasan, division chief of pediatric infectious diseases at RWJBarnabas Health in Livingston, N.J. “Fear should not guide our decision making.”

Source: Fahle, Kane, Patterson, Reardon, Staiger and Stuart, “ School District and Community Factors Associated With Learning Loss During the Covid-19 Pandemic. ”

The study used estimates of learning loss from the Stanford Education Data Archive . For closure lengths, the study averaged district-level estimates of time spent in remote and hybrid learning compiled by the Covid-19 School Data Hub (C.S.D.H.) and American Enterprise Institute (A.E.I.) . The A.E.I. data defines remote status by whether there was an in-person or hybrid option, even if some students chose to remain virtual. In the C.S.D.H. data set, districts are defined as remote if “all or most” students were virtual.

An earlier version of this article misstated a job description of Dr. Jeanne Noble. She directed the Covid response at the U.C.S.F. Parnassus emergency department. She did not direct the Covid response for the University of California, San Francisco health system.

How we handle corrections

Sarah Mervosh covers education for The Times, focusing on K-12 schools. More about Sarah Mervosh

Claire Cain Miller writes about gender, families and the future of work for The Upshot. She joined The Times in 2008 and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for public service for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues. More about Claire Cain Miller

Francesca Paris is a Times reporter working with data and graphics for The Upshot. More about Francesca Paris

Suggestions or feedback?

MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Machine learning
• Social justice
• Black holes
• Classes and programs

Departments

• Aeronautics and Astronautics
• Brain and Cognitive Sciences
• Architecture
• Political Science
• Mechanical Engineering

Centers, Labs, & Programs

• Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL)
• Picower Institute for Learning and Memory
• Lincoln Laboratory
• School of Architecture + Planning
• School of Engineering
• School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
• Sloan School of Management
• School of Science
• MIT Schwarzman College of Computing

AI generates high-quality images 30 times faster in a single step

Press contact :.

Previous image Next image

In our current age of artificial intelligence, computers can generate their own “art” by way of diffusion models , iteratively adding structure to a noisy initial state until a clear image or video emerges. Diffusion models have suddenly grabbed a seat at everyone’s table: Enter a few words and experience instantaneous, dopamine-spiking dreamscapes at the intersection of reality and fantasy. Behind the scenes, it involves a complex, time-intensive process requiring numerous iterations for the algorithm to perfect the image.

MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) researchers have introduced a new framework that simplifies the multi-step process of traditional diffusion models into a single step, addressing previous limitations. This is done through a type of teacher-student model: teaching a new computer model to mimic the behavior of more complicated, original models that generate images. The approach, known as distribution matching distillation (DMD), retains the quality of the generated images and allows for much faster generation. 

“Our work is a novel method that accelerates current diffusion models such as Stable Diffusion and DALLE-3 by 30 times,” says Tianwei Yin, an MIT PhD student in electrical engineering and computer science, CSAIL affiliate, and the lead researcher on the DMD framework. “This advancement not only significantly reduces computational time but also retains, if not surpasses, the quality of the generated visual content. Theoretically, the approach marries the principles of generative adversarial networks (GANs) with those of diffusion models, achieving visual content generation in a single step — a stark contrast to the hundred steps of iterative refinement required by current diffusion models. It could potentially be a new generative modeling method that excels in speed and quality.”

This single-step diffusion model could enhance design tools, enabling quicker content creation and potentially supporting advancements in drug discovery and 3D modeling, where promptness and efficacy are key.

Distribution dreams

DMD cleverly has two components. First, it uses a regression loss, which anchors the mapping to ensure a coarse organization of the space of images to make training more stable. Next, it uses a distribution matching loss, which ensures that the probability to generate a given image with the student model corresponds to its real-world occurrence frequency. To do this, it leverages two diffusion models that act as guides, helping the system understand the difference between real and generated images and making training the speedy one-step generator possible.

The system achieves faster generation by training a new network to minimize the distribution divergence between its generated images and those from the training dataset used by traditional diffusion models. “Our key insight is to approximate gradients that guide the improvement of the new model using two diffusion models,” says Yin. “In this way, we distill the knowledge of the original, more complex model into the simpler, faster one, while bypassing the notorious instability and mode collapse issues in GANs.” 

Yin and colleagues used pre-trained networks for the new student model, simplifying the process. By copying and fine-tuning parameters from the original models, the team achieved fast training convergence of the new model, which is capable of producing high-quality images with the same architectural foundation. “This enables combining with other system optimizations based on the original architecture to further accelerate the creation process,” adds Yin. 

When put to the test against the usual methods, using a wide range of benchmarks, DMD showed consistent performance. On the popular benchmark of generating images based on specific classes on ImageNet, DMD is the first one-step diffusion technique that churns out pictures pretty much on par with those from the original, more complex models, rocking a super-close Fréchet inception distance (FID) score of just 0.3, which is impressive, since FID is all about judging the quality and diversity of generated images. Furthermore, DMD excels in industrial-scale text-to-image generation and achieves state-of-the-art one-step generation performance. There's still a slight quality gap when tackling trickier text-to-image applications, suggesting there's a bit of room for improvement down the line. 

Additionally, the performance of the DMD-generated images is intrinsically linked to the capabilities of the teacher model used during the distillation process. In the current form, which uses Stable Diffusion v1.5 as the teacher model, the student inherits limitations such as rendering detailed depictions of text and small faces, suggesting that DMD-generated images could be further enhanced by more advanced teacher models. 

“Decreasing the number of iterations has been the Holy Grail in diffusion models since their inception,” says Fredo Durand, MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science, CSAIL principal investigator, and a lead author on the paper. “We are very excited to finally enable single-step image generation, which will dramatically reduce compute costs and accelerate the process.” 

“Finally, a paper that successfully combines the versatility and high visual quality of diffusion models with the real-time performance of GANs,” says Alexei Efros, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California at Berkeley who was not involved in this study. “I expect this work to open up fantastic possibilities for high-quality real-time visual editing.” 

Yin and Durand’s fellow authors are MIT electrical engineering and computer science professor and CSAIL principal investigator William T. Freeman, as well as Adobe research scientists Michaël Gharbi SM '15, PhD '18; Richard Zhang; Eli Shechtman; and Taesung Park. Their work was supported, in part, by U.S. National Science Foundation grants (including one for the Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions), the Singapore Defense Science and Technology Agency, and by funding from Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology and Amazon. Their work will be presented at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in June.

Share this news article on:

Related links.

• DMD project page
• Fredo Durand
• William Freeman
• Tianwei Yin
• Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)
• Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Related Topics

• Artificial intelligence
• Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (eecs)
• Computer vision
• Computer science and technology

Related Articles

New algorithm unlocks high-resolution insights for computer vision

Helping computer vision and language models understand what they see

Computer vision system marries image recognition and generation

Previous item Next item

More MIT News

Shining a light on oil fields to make them more sustainable

Read full story →

“Life is short, so aim high”

MIT launches Working Group on Generative AI and the Work of the Future

Atmospheric observations in China show rise in emissions of a potent greenhouse gas

Second round of seed grants awarded to MIT scholars studying the impact and applications of generative AI

VIAVI Solutions joins MIT.nano Consortium

• More news on MIT News homepage →

Massachusetts Institute of Technology 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA, USA

• Map (opens in new window)
• Events (opens in new window)
• People (opens in new window)
• Careers (opens in new window)
• Accessibility
• Social Media Hub
• MIT on Facebook
• MIT on YouTube
• MIT on Instagram

• Search Menu
• Volume 2024, Issue 3, March 2024 (In Progress)
• Volume 2024, Issue 2, February 2024
• Case of the Year
• MSF Case Reports
• Audiovestibular medicine
• Cardiology and cardiovascular systems
• Critical care medicine
• Dermatology
• Emergency medicine
• Endocrinology and metabolism
• Gastroenterology and hepatology
• Geriatrics and gerontology
• Haematology
• Infectious diseases and tropical medicine
• Medical ophthalmology
• Medical disorders in pregnancy
• Paediatrics
• Palliative medicine
• Pharmacology and pharmacy
• Radiology, nuclear medicine, and medical imaging
• Respiratory disorders
• Rheumatology
• Sexual and reproductive health
• Sports medicine
• Substance abuse
• Author Guidelines
• Submission Site
• Open Access
• Editorial Board
• Advertising and Corporate Services
• Journals Career Network
• Self-Archiving Policy
• Journals on Oxford Academic
• Books on Oxford Academic

Article Contents

Acknowledgements, conflict of interest statement, ethical approval.

• < Previous

Cutaneous implantation metastasis of papillary thyroid carcinoma: a caveat of fine needle aspiration

• Article contents
• Figures & tables
• Supplementary Data

Yotsapon Thewjitcharoen, Egkaluck Wanothayaroj, Veekij Veerasomboonsin, Cutaneous implantation metastasis of papillary thyroid carcinoma: a caveat of fine needle aspiration, Oxford Medical Case Reports , Volume 2024, Issue 3, March 2024, omae010, https://doi.org/10.1093/omcr/omae010

• Permissions Icon Permissions

A 57-year-old male presented with anterior neck mass for 6 months. Neck ultrasound revealed a huge cystic mass with a hypervascularity exophytic solid nodule, 2.7 cm in diameter at the left thyroid lobe. Approximately 55 ml of hemorrhagic fluid was aspirated and followed by fine needle aspiration (FNA) of the solid component with a 23-gage needle. Two days later, he returned with swollen and ecchymosis of the surrounding neck ( Fig. 1A ). The cervical hematoma resolved conservatively. The cytological diagnosis revealed a suspicious for malignancy and total thyroidectomy was done one month later. Classic variant of papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC) in the left thyroid gland with lymphatic invasion was found. No metastatic lymph node was detected. Postoperative high-dose radioiodine (RAI) ablation and thyroxine suppressive therapy were given. He was doing well with persistent biochemical incomplete response at one year after treatment and subsequently lost to follow-up. He came back two years later with palpable multiple subcutaneous nodules along the right side of the neck for 3 months. Ultrasound revealed small well-defined nodules (0.3 to 0.7 cm in diameter) located superficially over the right sternomastoid muscle ( Fig. 1B ). Serum thyroglobulin level increased from 17.2 ng/ml to 62.8 ng/ml and detectable thyroglobulin was found in fluid washouts from the nodule biopsy. Further investigations revealed no distant metastases. Neck reoperation confirmed skin metastasis of PTC ( Fig. 1B , inset). Based on the patient’s history and location of multiple subcutaneous nodules metastasis, cutaneous implantation PTC metastasis following the FNA was diagnosed. The patient was in stable condition with persistent biochemical incomplete response at the last follow-up.

( A ) Subcutaneous cervical hematoma of this patient after fine needle aspiration of huge cystic mass with a hypervascularity exophytic solid left thyroid nodule B ) Ultrasound appearance of small well-defined heterogeneous echogenic nodules (arrow) located superficially over the right sternomastoid muscle (size 0.3–0.4 cm) at 3 years later and neck reoperation confirmed skin metastasis of papillary thyroid cancer (inlet).

While needle tract seeding has long been recognized as an uncommon complication (less than 0.2% in incidence with variable time interval up to 11 years post-procedure) of the FNA of the thyroid nodules [ 1 ], seeding tumor metastasis resulted from subcutaneous hematoma following FNA is extremely rare [ 2 ]. Due to its rarity, there is no well-conducted study that needle track seeding affects long-term survival in patients with PTC. FNA of the thyroid is still regarded as a safe procedure. However, physicians should be watchful of hemorrhagic complications in high-risk patients [ 3 ] and aware that late complications such as seeding tumors could develop many years after bleeding complications.

Authors acknowledge expert guidance from Professor Rajata Rajatanavin, Mahidol University.

No conflicts of interest.

The authors received no financial support for this article.

No approval is required.

Written informed consent was obtained from the patient.

The first author is the guarantor of this work.

Polyzos   SA , Anastasilakis   AD . Clinical complications following thyroid fine-needle biopsy: a systematic review . Clin Endocrinol   2009 ; 71 : 157 – 65 .

Google Scholar

Na   CH , Kim   DJ , Kim   MS , Shin   BS . Cutaneous implantation metastasis of papillary thyroid carcinoma following fine needle aspiration biopsy . Ann Dermatol   2017 ; 29 : 123 – 5 .

Ljung   BM , Langer   J , Mazzaferri   EL , Oertel   YC , Wells   SA , Waisman   J . Training, credentialing and re-credentialing for the performance of a thyroid FNA: a synopsis of the National Cancer Institute thyroid fine-needle aspiration state of the science conference . Diagn Cytopathol   2008 ; 36 : 400 – 6 .

Email alerts

Citing articles via, affiliations.

• Online ISSN 2053-8855
• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• About Oxford Academic
• Publish journals with us
• University press partners
• What we publish
• New features  
• Open access
• Institutional account management
• Rights and permissions
• Get help with access
• Accessibility
• Advertising
• Media enquiries
• Oxford University Press
• Oxford Languages
• University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• Cookie settings
• Cookie policy
• Privacy policy
• Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.