081 Overtourism in Canada’s Mountain National Parks

This week, I look at the danger of overtourism in the Mountain West and how we need to rethink both how we market, and how we understand the true cost of tourism.

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New Research Looking into Overtourism

From the very first episodes of this Podcast, I’ve talked about the challenges of over-tourism in the Canadian Rockies. Every year the number of visitors increases while local, provincial, and federal tourism agencies continue to spend millions of dollars to attract more and more visitors. The Rockies are one of Canada’s most iconic destinations, but while more and more and more people flock to the same 2% of the park, the paved corridors, the local landscape becomes overwhelmed with oceans of people, cars, and an endless stream of rental RVs.

The Rockies are in good company as dozens of destinations worldwide that are finding themselves suffering due to unsustainable tourism burdens. Recently Megan Epler Wood, director of the International Sustainable Tourism Initiative at Harvard University presented some of their findings at the Banff Centre. Harvard produced a detailed report on the true cost of tourism entitled Destinations at Risk: The Invisible Burden of Tourism. It offers a detailed look at how places like Banff and Jasper can better understand how to reevaluate their tourism so as to reduce the risk of compromising the very thing that attracts visitors in the first place.

The term “overtourism” has now become so popular that it was one of Oxford Dictionary’s “Words of the Year” for 2018. This report offers one of the most complete analyses of the mistakes most tourism destinations make, as well as a prescription for charting a new course towards a more sustainable future.

One of the biggest challenges to any tourism destination has to do with what the report calls the invisible burden. This refers to the fact that tourist hot spots have a long list of costs that generally aren’t accounted for in tourism budgets and master plans. While current planning incorporates marketing costs, it rarely includes critical infrastructure and utility costs. The report states:

“Local capacity to manage the ballooning costs of tourists is hindered by a lack of quality analysis that accounts for the cost of managing each tourist on local municipal ledgers. This invisible set of local budgetary obligations is placing destinations in a position of financing additional required infrastructure for energy, waste, wastewater and the protection of natural and cultural resources, without recompense from the tourism economy. These costs lower the economic benefits of tourism and are not recognized in international and local economic impact analyses.”

As tourism grows, it puts an increasing burden on local communities that need to provide services for ever-increasing numbers of tourists, all of who need power, water, sewage treatment, roads and highways, etc. Rarely are these costs accounted for when tourism budgets are set.

All too often, budgets look at how much it will cost to manage tourism assets, but it doesn’t look at the true cost to manage each tourist. For years, communities like Canmore, Banff, and Jasper have been fighting provincial and federal budgets for increased tax revenue to help them manage all the additional costs of providing tourism infrastructure. Small tourist towns simply don’t have the local tax base to pay for all of the associated additional costs that result from high numbers of visitors.

This report defines the invisible burden “as the unaccounted for destination costs to provide local infrastructure and the protection of eco and socio-cultural systems for tourists and local people.”

Tourism brings a massive amount of money into local, provincial, and federal treasuries each year, largely through various taxes like GST, airfares, tourism levies, and accommodation. Unfortunately for the destination, most of those tax dollars leave the park to find their way into provincial and federal coffers. With a small tax base, the destination is expected to cover the costs of infrastructure to, according to the report: “transport, feed and house, provide energy and water, and manage wastewater for the growing numbers of visitors and tourism workers in each destination.”

The report continues:

“These local economic burdens are too often invisible to national decision makers who focus on promoting tourism growth, but are very real for local municipalities which are seeing budgets that exceed local uses by multiples of 8-10 times higher than local consumption without the utility metering to properly assess these costs.”

Unfortunately, the existing system of tourism measurements usually ignores these hidden costs. What is needed is a new way of accounting for the true cost of tourism that looks at all of the real and hidden costs to develop a true cost to the destination for each visitor. It also needs to account for who pays for those hidden costs to prevent negative impacts to both the destination and the natural and cultural assets that the destination is trying to protect.

Already, sites like Lake Louise, Peyto Lake, and Moraine Lake are collapsing under unsustainable numbers of visitors at peak times. Townsites are struggling to maintain road and utility infrastructures to support the endless numbers of visitors drawn by glitzy brochures, Youtube marketing videos, and Instagram photos.

To an accountant, all of these unaccounted for costs of being a tourism destination are defined as “operational externalities”. This past winter, I travelled to the Mayan Riviera and unfortunately, it has become a poster child for what happens when these externalities are ignored.

One of the main costs that are often ignored when tourism budgets are created is the cost to support and service the workforce that is critical to the experience of visitors that are drawn to the place. Because these costs are often ignored, the tourism budgets didn’t provide funding to cover the growing costs of infrastructure to compensate for the seasonal influx of workers.

In the Mayan Riviera, only a third of the sewage and gray water is treated, meaning that human waste was usually illegally dumped, finding its way into rivers, underground caves (or cenotes), and eventually the ocean. This, along with warming climates, has fueled massive blooms of algae which now fouls most of the beaches along the coast.

In addition to the seaweed, overbuilding on the coast caused erosion to degrade many of the beaches for which the Mayan Riviera has become famous. Now when you want to go to the Riviera, one of your first priorities is to look for hotels with fewer reports of seaweed yet still have nice sandy beaches.

Like many destinations, 80% of the tax revenue goes to the national coffers and not into the local community. As a result, the very things that attract millions of tourists every year are being slowly lost. As for me, I’ll stick to the left coast of Mexico from now on…at least until I see the same challenges taking root there.

There are so many costs that are usually ignored in tourism budgets. Here is a list of some of the most critical:

• Greenhouse gas emissions
• ecosystem maintenance
• ecosystem restoration
• renewable energy costs
• renewable water sources
• wastewater management
• socio-cultural restoration
• socio-cultural maintenance

If we look at just the cost of providing energy and reducing Greenhouse gases, it’s important to account for the cost of infrastructure upgrades, the management of peak power demand, and an increased reliance on non-renewable energy sources.

According to the report:

“The challenge for the tourism sector is determining how best to account for the operational externalities caused by the invisible burden in order to support destinations from further erosion of cultural and environmental value and operational losses. In short, we need to develop approaches that enable localities to measure and manage the true costs of operations at the destination level. Tourism businesses may ostensibly pay for municipal services such as water and energy, and the use or maintenance of public assets such as beaches and monuments, but additional costs associated with tourism are often passed on, partially or fully, to residents.”

Last week I mentioned in an unrelated story that the funny thing about science is that you rarely get results that you don’t look for. When it comes to the impact that tourism has on driving up local energy costs and greenhouse gas emissions, to a large part it’s due to the simple fact that governments haven’t sought out the information.

More importantly, is investigating what the peak energy demands are during the busiest times of the tourism season. Energy infrastructure has to be able to deal with the very highest demands, even though they may only occur for a short period during each tourist season.

The report states:

“The process of managing costs for energy, and accounting for those costs per tourist, will allow decision-makers to judge what steps are required in order to cover costs while transitioning to a greener economy, as part of their commitment to the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals.”

Understanding the basic energy costs PER VISITOR gives a value that can be easily tied to other tourism metrics. For instance, most tourism plans account for the marketing cost to acquire a single visitor. Accounting for all infrastructure inputs per visitor allows for a more realistic way to plan and budget for the true cost of tourism in a particular destination.

In many destinations, water and solid waste treatment are even more critical. Tourist destinations like Canmore, Banff, and Jasper need to constantly pay for upgrades to their fresh water system, sewage treatment, and solid waste management. These are costs that are largely incurred because of the additional load on the systems brought about by ever-increasing numbers of tourists.

Just this year, the Town of Canmore announced that it will be borrowing 7.6 million dollars to help pay for the replacement of a wastewater lift station, construction of a new water main, upgrades of numerous wastewater mains, and improvement to the water pressure along Bow Valley Trail.

In 2018, Parks Canada completed a 6 million dollar upgrade to the sewage treatment plant at the Miette Hot Springs.

More and more visitors will mean that investments in these critical infrastructure projects will continue to be needed, yet are not accounted for in tourism marketing budgets or tax revenue to the communities that need to pay for them. Instead, they rely on occasional infrastructure grants, or as in the town of Canmore, the community taking on debt to pay for them.

In 2016, Canmore, Banff, and Jasper collaborated to produce a report examining the true cost of being tourism destinations. They learned that collectively, the three communities account for just 0.68% of Alberta’s population, but hosted 13% of provincial tourism visitation.

In addition, visitors to the Rockies generated $1.09 billion dollars in direct tourism spending in 2012 out of a provincial total of $7.27 billion. The three towns were responsible for 24.8% of Alberta’s international tourism revenue, or $700 million dollars in 2012.

By 2015, the three communities were generating $1.5 billion dollars. Banff generated 57.4% of that with $885.5 million. Next was Canmore with $344.9 million and Jasper with $318 million dollars in direct tourism spending.

Across the province, 23,301 Albertans worked in the tourism industry, and of that number, 18,539 were in Canmore, Banff, and Jasper.

The amount of total GDP or Gross Domestic Product contributed by tourism for each town varies based on how diversified their economies are. For Banff, with no other real industry, tourism accounts for a whopping 89% of the GDP. Jasper is more diversified due to the Canadian National Railway and so tourism accounts for 48% of the GDP while Canmore is the most diverse of all with tourism accounting for 18% of the GDP.

Unfortunately, relative to the number of tourists that visit each year, the permanent populations of the communities are quite small. The report states:

 “The three communities draw large numbers of visitors annually. The number of visitors far exceeds the resident population of each community, which presents unique challenges. These challenges include much higher than average infrastructure costs to support the large visitor population. There is also a need to provide higher capacity and higher quality infrastructure, civic amenities, and services to support the many visitors to the area. The resulting ‘wear and tear’ on civic infrastructure from high use also leads to high maintenance and operating costs for the local governments. This issue is further exacerbated by limited revenue-generating tools that the local governments can employ, forcing them to rely primarily on property tax revenue. The Province’s formula for infrastructure funding, which is based on resident population, does not result in funding that accounts for the large number of visitors.”

Things are even more complicated in Canmore where 30% of the population are not permanent residents, which had driven house prices to the point where they are unaffordable for many of the workers needed to service these large numbers of visitors. As a result, we read stories about “Vanmore” with large numbers of people living in their vans and campers in order to have an affordable place to sleep.

In an article in the Rocky Mountain Outlook, Lisa DeSoto, Canmore’s Chief administration officer was quoted as saying:

“From our perspective, the growth in the tourism industry cannot happen without the support of the mountain municipalities of Canmore, Banff and Jasper, however the current revenue model that is available to municipalities through the Municipal Government Act is pretty much reliant solely on property taxes, we have very few revenue tools,

She continued:

“We believe this revenue model disproportionately burdens the local taxpayer and actually benefits visitors and higher orders of government.”

Despite the fact that the province charges visitors a 4% tourism tax on hotel rooms, none of that money stays in the communities that collect it. It all goes into tourism marketing, which only serves to make the situation worse.

At the same time, it’s unfair to place the entire burden on the hotel industry. There needs to be a way to keep more of the tax dollars currently generated in these communities.

In other global tourism destinations, the communities are able to impose additional tourism taxes or levies in order to account for some of these hidden costs. Unfortunately, the Government of Alberta does not allow communities to levy these additional dollars.

British Columbia has a program called the Resort Municipality Initiative with divvies up $13 million between 14 communities that, like Canmore, Banff, and Jasper, are tourism towns. It’s designed to help them to drive tourism to their communities.

Tourism has much higher costs to the communities that support the visitors and there needs to be a way to make those communities sustainable.

Rocky Mountain Ecosystems at Risk from Overtourism

Perhaps the areas that are most at risk in the central Rockies are the actual natural and cultural assets that draw visitors to the area. Around the world, destinations are sacrificing the natural and cultural capital that forms the main reason that people visit. Globally, the natural capital found in protected areas accounts for $700 billion in tourism revenue and more than 8 billion visits annually.

Despite this massive income stream, only $10 billion is spent annually to maintain these parks and protected areas. According to the United Nation’s best estimate, that number should be closer to $76 billion if destinations want to protect the biodiversity and ecological integrity of those same protected areas.

In the mountain national parks, our local landmarks are overrun by unsustainable numbers of visitors, and there is increased pressure to develop environmentally destructive trails like the now-defunct Icefields Trail proposal.

More and more companies and government tourism departments are seeing dollar signs, but the landscape – the real reason that the visitors are drawn to the mountain west – is being treated as if it is invincible.

I applaud many of the changes that Parks Canada has undertaken in order to reduce congestion on roads in Banff, as well as the increased availability of public transit to help people visit sites like Lake Louise, Moraine Lake, and Lake Minnewanka. Unfortunately, if the main reason for these moves is to simply get more people on the shoreline of Lake Louise than the entire process is folly.

We are at a point where we need to begin to demarket certain locations and also put finite limits on the number of visitors that can be at a certain site at a particular time. To date, Parks Canada has not been willing to limit the number of visitors to sites like Lake Louise and as a result, the experience available to the average visitor during the peak season has dropped precipitously over the past 10 years.

These problems are not unique to Canada’s mountain national parks. Yellowstone National Park is feeling the same crush. In August of 2017, they released a transportation study. It stated:

” The new data from the Visitor Use Study shows that visitors enjoy and care about Yellowstone, but they think it’s too crowded during the summer season. Visitors value the park for its natural character and come specifically to experience scenery, wildlife, thermal features, a largely intact ecosystem, and sounds of quiet and nature. More than half of Yellowstone’s visitors surveyed think that there are too many people in the park.”

It continues:

” The Transportation and Vehicle Mobility Study shows that within Yellowstone’s most heavily-travelled corridors, parking lots are overflowing, traffic jams abound, and roadway safety incidents are on the rise. The report identifies the busiest corridors as the roads that connect Yellowstone’s West Entrance with visitor attractions throughout the western and central parts of the park (such as Old Faithful, other geyser basins, the Canyon Area, Hayden Valley, Fishing Bridge, and Lake Village). During much of the summer season, there are on average nearly 30 percent more vehicles using these corridors than those roads can comfortably and safely handle. “

Banff Townsite is also seeing more and more congestion every year. While 24,000 cars per day are considered the start of serious congestion, once the daily total exceeds 20,000 cars drivers begin to experience ever-increasing delays as they try to navigate town roads.

In Episode 47, I looked at some of the congestion problems already occurring within Banff National Park. In the 2017-18 fiscal year, 4.2 million cars entered and exited the park. This was up 22% over the 2013-14 tourism season.

If we combine all seven mountain parks, including Banff, Jasper, Yoho, Kootenay, Waterton Lakes, Mount Revelstoke, and Glacier, a total of 9,207,562 visitors were recorded during the 2017-18 fiscal year.

The town of Banff counted 4.6 million cars so far this year which is an astounding increase of 21% over 2014. A full 1.7 million of those were during the summer.

While the maximum vehicle count was 34,275 on July 2, the average count was 27,512. This means that almost every day was above the congestion point of 24,000 cars.

It’s clear that these ever-increasing numbers aren’t sustainable. Adding additional public transportation, as the park has done with free shuttles, without a financial disincentive to driving doesn’t solve the problem.

One of Banff’s former superintendents, Kevin Van Tighem, has suggested parking fees for private vehicles to visit key sites like Lake Louise and Moraine Lake. This would provide a financial incentive for people to park their cars and use the shuttles.

Another option, as suggested in the report on the invisible burden, is to look at inventory control, much like airlines do. If the park is willing to determine a finite limit to the number of visitors that a site like Lake Louise can support, then it can create an online booking system to allow visitors to book their shuttles online.

This would allow them to manage the inventory and would also help people that are planning a trip to know when they can visit. It would reduce the endless growth and give managers a way to reduce the congestion at our most iconic locations.

It’s not inconceivable to begin charging for the shuttles in the future. I can envision a time when only the shuttles, and perhaps hotel guests, are allowed to drive to the shoreline parking lot of Lake Louise. Everyone would arrive in pre-booked buses.

This would help to provide income for the park to help it cover some of the many costs associated with providing the shuttle service. Currently, the free shuttles amount to just another unbudgeted cost to Parks Canada. It should be a self-funded service so that dollars are not diverted from other important functions like wildlife research and conservation.

In fact, with an online booking system, it would be easy to discount visits during off-peak hours and shoulder seasons. The more we expand the tourism season outside of the July and August peak, the less stress we put on our park resources. There could also be incentives for early booking.

To add another wrinkle, one that I’m not sure how I feel about, the report suggests that, like the airlines, parks could charge different fees based on demand. Peak hours could cost more than off-peak times. This would definitely help to steer visitors to getting up earlier or visiting later.

It would though, add an economic filter to the cost of visitation, and that may be less palatable here where it would mean that people with more money were the only ones visiting at the most convenient times. I have to stress the fact that it would be the most convenient, and not the BEST times.

If you want the absolute best visit at most of our mountain sites, arriving (during the peak summer months) at 6 am or at 8 pm, depending on the site, is a much better visual experience – and the crowds are less of an issue. I for one, strongly encourage my clients to do exactly this.

I want my clients to get the best experience and not the most convenient one. If you’ll get up early, I’ll show you Lake Louise as few other visitors see it – and it will likely be much quieter than it will be by 9 am. Your day’s outing will end earlier and you can relax in your hotel or explore the townsite at a more leisurely pace.

If your focus is on photography, well, we’ll want to head out waaaaaay earlier to get the best light. Mid-day is for naps when your a photographer. It’s all about the first light of day and the last light at twilight.

All of this crowding adds to the challenges of ecological integrity. In the last episode, I talked about how our caribou herds are already on the verge of collapse due to excessive development in their critical habitats. According to the newly published Wildlife Protection Assessment by the World Wildlife Fund, across Canada, 84% of habitats with high concentrations of at-risk species are either inadequately or completely unprotected.

Likewise, Seventy seven percent of habitats with high densities of soil carbon or forest biomass are inadequately or entirely unprotected. Both of these habitats are very effective at sequestering carbon, helping to reduce the rate of global warming. In episode 76, I shared a report that showed that Canada is already warming at twice the global average.

As summers have been warming, trees are now growing higher and higher up the mountains. This places some of our high elevation specialists like pika and mountain goats at risk as their habitat shrinks.

As we look at the future of tourism in Canada, and in the Rockies in particular, we need to keep our focus on making it as sustainable as possible. To do this, we’ll need to implement some way to not just reduce the number of vehicles at popular destinations, but also the number of people.

According to the National Parks Act, the protection and restoration of ecological integrity is the primary responsibility of every Park Superintendent. It is the measure by which ALL tourism decisions are supposed to be measured. Currently, the mountain national parks are at a very high risk of permanently impacting both the ecology of the mountain landscapes while also diluting the quality of the experience that draws visitors to the mountains.

And with that said, it’s time to wrap this episode up. Don’t forget that Ward Cameron Enterprises is your source for making the most out of your visit to western Canada. Don’t forget to check out the show notes at www.MountainNaturePodcast.com/ep081 for links to the original source material mentioned in this episode as well as additional material. If you’d like to reach out personally, you can hit me up on Twitter @wardcameron, or drop me a line at info@wardcameron.com…and with that the sun’s out and it’s time to go hiking. I’ll talk to you next week.