The Travel Industry Has Ambitious Climate Goals. How Will It Meet Them?

An entire country in the Pacific is uploading itself to the metaverse. Tuvalu, a low-lying South Pacific island nation midway between Hawaii and Australia, could be the world’s first digital country—the first to move its land, landmarks, and culture to the cloud while some 12,000 of its people are forced elsewhere.

The whole nation could go underwater by the end of the century due to climate change. Tuvalu’s foreign minister Simon Kofe made the chilling announcement in a video for the annual COP27 United Nations’ climate summit that took place in Egypt this month. “Without a global conscience and a global commitment to our shared wellbeing, we may soon find the rest of the world joining us online as their lands disappear,” he warned.

The revelation begs the question: What other destinations that we love—and places we call home—will be destroyed or uninhabitable due to climate-driven floods, storms, droughts, and forest fires in the coming decades?

COP27 negotiations in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, ended earlier this month with a promise for climate justice: a landmark deal to establish a “loss and damage” fund to help developing countries cope with climate disasters that are made worse by historic emissions from wealthier nations. It aims to address a situation where a country like Tuvalu, whose carbon emissions combined with the entirety of the Pacific Islands amounts to less than 0.03 percent of the world’s total, is facing…