There’s an irony in last-chance tourism: the more we travel to visit far-flung, climate-impacted destinations, the more carbon we emit.
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s I wandered down to the shore of Washington State’s Lake Kachess, I expected I’d quickly swap dusty pebbles for slippery stones at the water’s edge. But I kept walking, and walking, and walking.
The shoreline never came.
The water level had fallen so low that, rather than the vast lake I’d come to expect after years of visiting, all that was left was a puddle-pocked mudscape with little more than a pond of shallow water. It was a far cry from what I remembered from my first visit to Kachess in my teens.
An unseasonably warm winter had resulted in less snowfall in the Cascades—leading to below average levels of snowpack and much less meltwater to fill the lake basin, a trend that’s expected to continue as climate change worsens.
Kachess is just one of many alpine lakes and natural environments around the globe suffering from the climate crisis, but it’s one of the clearest examples I’ve seen of just how quickly parts of the world are slipping away.
When a place we love is disappearing before our eyes, our first instinct is to grab on as hard as we can to try and save it or snatch some kind of relic to show that yes, we’ve been there, and yes, it was real, but no, it’s not here anymore.
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This is the essence of last-chance tourism: see it before it’s gone. It’s also the driving force behind one of the most ethically complicated trends in travel.
Coined by Canadian professor Jackie Dawson, last-chance tourism occurs when travelers specifically visit destinations or experiences at risk from the climate crisis.
We’re no longer seeking to be the first to visit a new place—we’re trying to be the last.
A Double-Edged Sword
“The impulse for people to ‘see it before it’s gone,’ whether or not they recognize it, is an implicit recognition of environmental vulnerability and fragility,” said M Jackson, a glaciologist and National Geographic Society Explorer.
She explained that while this can lead to reflection on our relationship with the environment, it “puts the environment under a consumable lens” as though it’s content to be consumed.
“You open up the door to where engaging with the environment starts to look like, ‘Hey, I was there, I saw that,’ and that has some kind of ramification,” Jackson said.
At its best, last-chance tourism can inspire environmental advocacy, funnel money toward conservation efforts, and educate travelers about the impacts of climate change. At its worst, however, it risks turning environmental devastation into a bucket-list item to check off.
“I worry about last-chance tourism when people are doing it in a performative sense—where, via social media, they want people to see they’ve done something others won’t be able to do in the future—and when it sounds like it’s somewhat voyeuristic,” added Regina Scheyvens, a professor of development studies at New Zealand’s Massey University, whose research focuses on sustainable tourism.
She explained that sustainable tourism is about more than just the environment: it includes making sure the economy benefits from visitors and that the community wants tourism to occur.
“If people are living somewhere that’s been labelled by visitors as a ‘last-chance’ destination, their local environments are under threat,” Scheyvens said. “There are going to be a lot of other things on their minds besides accommodating travelers or developing tourist infrastructure. Visiting these places might not be in the best interest of the community.”
1. Lake Kachess when full.Jake Vacek/iStock; 2. Lake Kachess’ dried-up lake bed.Alex Blaze/Shutterstock
Walking on Ice
Still, Scheyvens noted certain ways of visiting at-risk destinations can be less harmful than others, particularly when the environment is engaged with safely.
Take the Great Barrier Reef: the reef covers a huge swath of seafloor, and “respectful snorkelers and divers themselves might not be causing more damage to it,” particularly if they’ve travelled domestically versus taking a long-haul flight, she explained.
While a flight from Sydney to Cairns and a boat cruise out to the reef still produce significant carbon emissions, their overall carbon footprint is smaller than that of someone who flew from Los Angeles or Paris.
Another concern in some regions can be a lack of tourism infrastructure—meaning that the environment might not be prepared to handle an influx of visitors. Jackson explained that there’s been a significant increase in cryospheric tourism in recent years, with large numbers of visitors flocking to glaciers across the Arctic Circle, attracted increasingly to ice caves.
You can see the impacts on the ice and in glacier foregrounds. Beyond glaciers melting at a breakneck pace from global warming, tourists are crowding onto trails and causing erosion, and shedding pocket lint and plastics in glacial caves.
“Glacier foregrounds aren’t made for people walking in a straight line,” she added, noting tourism often leads to having too many people in the landscape.
Plus, Antarctic cruises emit approximately eight times more greenhouse gas emissions per day than the average international trip—meaning they play an outsized role in the warming that’s melting the glaciers the cruises came to see.
The climate crisis is also making glacial tourism more dangerous. While ice cave tours in the Arctic Circle aren’t new, Jackson noted that walks through the glacier tunnels were only led in the winter. But increased demand has led to a high-profit industry popping up with some tour operators offering these visits in the summer.
“Especially as climate change increases air temperatures, glacier access in the summer can be unsafe, and anyone offering ice cave access in the summer season is irresponsible and unsafe,” she said, pointing at an August 2024 ice cave collapse in Iceland that killed one person and injured another. “The reason tourists hire a guide is to keep them safe. The guides are supposed to teach them about the glacier.”
“Glacial tourism is so lucrative that safety standards in some places across the cryosphere either don’t exist or aren’t meaningfully enforced,” she added.
On the flipside, she said, it can be easier to see evidence of climate change in the cryosphere, as it’s more visible to the naked eye than changing temperature averages.
“You can visit a glacier in Iceland at the start of the summer, take a picture, and come back a few months later at the end of the summer,” Jackson said. “It won’t look the same. You have a believable, visual record that gives you the ability to say, ‘It looked like this, and now it looks like that.’”
Heating Up
Beyond glacier melt, extreme temperatures and rising sea levels are also hitting key cultural and historical sites around the world.
World heritage in the Mediterranean is greatly at risk.
A 2018 study published in Nature Communications found that over 90% of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage sites in the region are at risk of coastal erosion and flooding. 47 of the 49 sites—including Venice and its lagoon, Dubrovnik’s Old Town, and various archaeological digs—will be in danger by the end of the century.
Venice is a particularly salient example, as it already regularly experiences “acqua alta” events, or seasonal high tides during the fall and winter. Of all the sites studied, it was found to have the highest potential flood depth of 8.2 feet. To date, the highest recorded flood was 6.36 feet nearly 60 years ago, which demolished over 75% of the city’s businesses.
Coupled with natural sediment compaction that makes Venice sink a few millimeters annually, many fear that the city could be partially or fully underwater before 2150 (if not earlier).
Slightly further east, the Dead Sea, an important religious site, is in danger of drying up. It’s losing a meter of water every year due to rising temperatures, upstream dams, mineral mining, and climate change-fueled groundwater depletion; the decline is only expected to worsen without intervention.
Tragedy of the Commons
Therein lies the irony of last-chance tourism: the more we travel to visit far-flung, climate-impacted destinations, the more carbon we emit, which then quickens global warming and the rate of environmental degradation.
That tension forces us to confront a difficult truth: there’s no “guilt-free” way to travel to disappearing places. The question becomes how to minimize harm while still engaging with the environment and the community meaningfully.
“It’s got to be about the people having a say in what happens in their environment—and making sure they’re benefiting from it,” Scheyvens said, pointing out that in many cases, tourism dollars leave the regional economy when lodging or tour operators aren’t based in the region. “If local communities don’t want tourism at that moment, we need to respect that.”
Slowing down is a powerful first step to reducing travel’s environmental impacts.
By spending longer in fewer destinations, we cut down our per-day carbon footprint and deepen our understanding of a place. Plus, off-peak tourism is not only more budget-friendly and less crowded, but also eases strain on tourism infrastructure.
Destination choice also matters, as we can be so focused on visiting Instagram’s beautiful world wonders that we forget to explore what’s in our own backyard and accessible via train or car rather than by plane.
Some of the most at-risk environments have similarly appealing “dupes” that can be more sustainable options. Interested in canals, aquamarine water, and European history, but can’t stomach the idea of visiting Venice after you learned it’s sinking? Annecy, an idyllic French lake town 25 miles from Geneva, is a wonderful alternative.
Letting Go
Though I haven’t been back to Kachess since I found the water pulled back from the shore like an unmade bed, the sight of it has stuck with me ever since. It’s flavored the memory with a complicated mix of emotions: awe, grief, and a desire to remember it exactly as it was before.
Last-chance tourism feeds on that impulse.
That’s the challenge, I suppose. To visit Kachess—or a glacier, or a reef—and not just see it before it’s gone, but to do our part and make sure it’s still here for someone else to see.