Polar expedition cruise tourism emerged in the 1960s, and even then, onboard lectures about the geography and history of destinations were an integral part of the cruise experience and product. As Sir David Attenborough put it: “No one will protect what they don’t care about; and no one will care about what they have never experiences.”
Educated people, who saw things with their own eyes, would then become a potent force for the preservation of the places they visited. These arguments of creating ambassadors for the polar regions were embraced by exploration cruise operators, providing a form of legitimacy for the tourism industry to keep growing in remote and vulnerable regions, particularly the Arctic and the Antarctic.
More recently, exploration cruise operators started to invite scientists onboard their vessels, to allow them to conduct fieldwork – for free – in remote and cost-prohibitive polar regions. Besides, in the past few years, polar tourism companies even started to create foundations through which they support scientific projects and promote science-tourism collaborations. In this context, some media and academics have expressed concerns that science-tourism collaborations serve primarily to justify the presence of cruise companies in remote and fragile regions, questioning the true objectives of such expeditions and raising issues related to the politics of knowledge, the commercialization of science, and, ultimately, accusing tourism actors of greenwashing and science-washing.
Nevertheless, little research has examined these collaborations, and critics have primarily focused on their negative aspects, and thus, research is needed to either confirm these critics, or at least, bring nuances in these too-often polarized debates.
In line with this, I conducted a short research visit in South Africa, including both a visit at the University of Johannesburg, and exploratory fieldwork in Cape Town. Anyone – tourists and scientists alike – willing to travel to Antarctica generally must transit via a gateway city. It is commonly accepted that there are five main gateway cities to the Seventh Continent: Ushuaia (Argentina), Punta Arenes (Chile), Hobart (Tasmania, Australia), Christchurch (New Zealand), and Cape Town, the last of which has been comparatively less examined in polar tourism studies.
The goal of this exploratory fieldwork was to initiate research on both the drawback and added-values of these science-tourism collaborations from the resilience lens. Particularly, I aim to investigate how these collaborations can lead to resilience building, and to elucidate how, via these collaborations, the tourism industry can contribute to continuous data monitoring in both the Arctic and Antarctic in a polycrisis context, given the significant impacts of climate change on these regions’ socio-ecological systems.
In practice, during my time in Cape Town, I met with colleagues from the Universities of Cape Town and Stellenbosch, the Antarctic Legacy of South Africa project, and the South African National Antarctic Programme, as well as with representatives from tourism companies involved in bringing tourists to Antarctica and supporting Antarctic scientific research, to discuss their respective perspectives and to prospect for further long-term collaborations.
It is expected that this research will contribute to a better understanding of the complex contemporary interactions between science and tourism; and to contribute to the recent and ongoing discussions in academia and the media. Eventually, this project will provide actionable recommendations for both polar science and tourism actors in order to avoid poor data collection and better support science in the polar regions. This is critical because poor data collection creates a lack of credibility for both tourism companies and scientists involved in these collaborations, may lead to issues of greenwashing and science-washing, and ultimately to detrimental reputations for both science and tourism actors.
Writer of this blog post is Alix Varnajot, Postdoctoral Researcher from the Geography Research Unit at the University of Oulu. Varnajot was granted the “Resilience Oulu Academy Mobility” (ROAM) funding for his research visit from FRONT research programme.
The Exploring resilience blog discusses the current themes of research, teaching and development of resilience, i.e., crisis resistance and deepens knowledge about the management of global change, and possible solutions to the wicked problems of sustainability. The authors are researchers and experts in the field, and members of the cooperation networks of the University of Oulu’s FRONT PROFI7 research programme.