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TEDx Talks
Published: 2017-09-13
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtv4BHqEpN8
sometimes my husband and I go to a dinner party where we meet new people and inevitably it was we're done talking about the weather to conversation turns to what we do for a living I am a professor of chemistry my husband says and he continues to say he developed methods to better measure the mass of everyone is totally impressed and full of expectation returned to me
and I think what am I gonna say mother of tool social scientist Indiana legislators cities I'm a tourism researcher well nobody's impressed anymore in fact there's an awkward silence and people say things like who that's lovely I like to travel to so I thought I'd take the opportunity today to ask you for a favor if you ever meet the tourism research at a dinner party please
be nice to them but I can't ask you for his favor without convincing you of two things the first one is tourism research is tricky it's right up there with weighing the mass of atoms and secondly tourism research can change the world now before I convince you of these let me show you the size of the tourism industry internationally what you see here is a bar
chart showing you the number of international tourists traveling every single year so the very start nineteen ninety five to two thousand fifteen the number double it in two thousand fifteen one point two billion international tourists traveled every single year and it's it's not stopping there allows bar UC's two thousand thirteen where we're predicting one point eight billion international on top of that we've got another five
to six billion domestic tourists traveling and every day today more than eight million people are seeking an airplane this is a massive massive industry and that comes with social and economic benefits the tourism industry contributes ten percent of the global GDP and is responsible for one out of every eleven jobs on the planet that's fantastic but it comes at a price tourism also contributes up to
twelve point five percent of global warming generates five percent of CO two emissions thirty five million tons of solid waste every year and accommodation alone that's hotels motels BNP's US one point three cubic kilometers of water every single year so if we want to protect the ten percent GDP and if you want to secure one out of eleven jobs we must make the tourism industry more
environmentally now how can we do it governments could regulate tourism but in so doing they sacrificed tourism revenue so most of them don't tourism industry could self regulates but in so doing they reduce their profits did affect their bottom line so most of them don't what does that leave us with when it leaves us with you and me with the tourists and that sounds pretty desperate
those units yeah but remembered as one point two billion international on another five to six billion domestic tourists so that's a lot of people and if we could convince just a small fraction of these people to behave a little bit more environmentally friendly it could have a big impact on the sustainability of the tourism industry now that should be heart after all tourists like the environment
and tourists say they %HESITATION considered environment when they may booking decisions when we tested this with bolts we asked people who were just bought a ticket for one of two boats why they chose this particular boat tour and we asa them whether they consider Dane varmint when they chose the boat tour and good meals sixty percent of our study participants said yes I consider the environment
when I chose my boat tour well after that we hopped on the boat with them and you should know that the two boats were identical except for one thing won gold was people certified the other one was not so we hopped on a boat with them and we ask one additional question is the bolt on which you are right now eco certified or is it not
and guess what only twenty three percent of the people on the eve of certified both gave us the correct answer that means only fourteen percent of our study participants were actually on the Yugoslav divide both and knew that they were on the eco certified so that's not very encouraging it tells us the tourists love the environment they tell us to consider the environment when to go
on vacation but really they dot not so with all right fair enough there's got to be at least some dedicated environmentalists are going to put their money where their mouths so we approach women tearing organizations environmental volunteering organizations as well costs could we interview your volunteers and we interviewed quite a few of them but only one mentions environment at all when talking about the last vacation
we then reminded them that tourism is not particularly environmentally friendly and they all knew it not only did they know it they felt quite guilty about but the kids did not translate into behavior instead they came up with a very rich portfolio of explanations uses why they can't behave environmentally friend yeah sure my holiday is no good for the environment but look at these mass tourist
they're much worse than me my grandmother is sick she lives in Europe I have to visit her I have to travel for work yeah sure the tourism industry is bad but look at the coal industry of the mining industry much worse much worse I cannot afford looking into it ecologically it's too expensive so a large number of excuses %HESITATION but what we learn from this study
is that even a tree hugging hippies like me do not behave environmentally friendly when they go on vacation so we thought what can we do maybe we need to remind people we haven't given up hope in humanity we think maybe we go in a hotel we just forget our bad habits and what we need to do is we need to remind people to the right thing
so we went into a four star hotel and installed electro meters in almost a hundred hotel rooms and we then measured the baseline electricity use in all those hotel rooms then we used little stickers three different kinds one that was kind of a bit boring reminding people to save electricity one that was a really big banks so it was meant to be more like targets and
a third one which was deliberately designed to infuse gates into toward the stickers were quite targeted because we had them at every single switch for an electrical appliance right not just one little card somewhere hidden in the whole damn every single switch had a sticker but guess what absolutely nothing Steiger no sticker biggest aggregate sticker no difference whatsoever so this point was started getting seriously concerned
with satellite clearly talking to people preaching to them educating them explaining reminding doesn't work maybe what we need to do is we need to entice them we need to not stand to behave more environmental different now the most famous study in Nigeria it is to put a fly on the inside of a urine and that does what it improve the precision of the boy's targeting right
now the aim of the flies look to educate the boys not to change their values not to change their beliefs the aim is not to change the precision of their targeting for the rest of their lives it's just fun to target that particular flight in death particular urinal at that particular so maybe that's all we need in tourism because after all what we want to do
is we want to change one tourist behavior at one destination at one particular time that's all and good newest there's evidence that it works reducing the size of the plates and the breakfast buffet by three centimeters leads to twenty percent less food waste food waste is a big environmental issue it takes electricity water energy to produce food two story two refrigerated to transport it you prepare
it and even then we end up not eating it it goes into landscape in the land speed that produces a gas called Hussein which warms the glow between twenty eight and eighty six times more than CO two with us so that's a really big problem but just changing the plate size by three centimeters drop school based behind a percent and guess what our tourists are just
as happy as they were with the big fight because they can go and get more if they want so it's very simple solution how we can a make out breakfast buffets more environmentally friendly another study I lost the question how much do we actually producing food waste when we go to a breakfast buffet and the answer is every time and that's for a four star hotel
people go take foods they leave on average every day fifteen point two grants now fifteen point two grams doesn't sound like particularly much an infected isn't it's about half a bowl of corn flakes but remember we have one going to be an international interests five to six billion domestic tourists so if each one of their waists for not four nights of average state hop a bowl
of cornflakes we can line up does corn flakes three hundred fifteen times around the globe and that's every single year the same study also found the tourists from different countries of origin have different foodways behavior some dog waste food at all others waste a lot of food we also learned that food abundance affects foodways so the more food we see the more we think it's probably
nothing special and we are more willing to waste and then this will not surprise you families are the workers culprits I know that from my kids we go to attend the zoom around the breakfast buffet they grab every cake that they can possibly grasp of course they find the top of them are not Yummy and those are Dan thrown away another way how we can and
time is stories to behave more environmentally friendly is to give them a little reward for the desired be now you're all Houston to require a request to please re use your powers well we thought we take it a step further and would ask people to waive the entire room clean because if you don't clean the room automatically you don replays the palace but there's additional benefits
overall we save one point five kilowatt hours of electricity hundred milliliters of chemicals and thirty five meters of water if we waive a room clean hotel guests are not very excited about being honest is kind of things they're cynical they don't seed as an environmental activity there they think all wet assured a hotel wants to save money at my expense so what we did is we
sat fair enough we save a lot of money actually if we don't clean your room everyday but we will offer you an equitable solution hop of the money you say the hotel who gets and how could that money is returned to the tourists in the form of drinks voucher and they can use the drink vodka when they have dinner at the hotel this little initiative man
that's forty two percent of that routine cleans that would have usually happens did not happen and guess what the tourists were just as happy in fact if you trust hotel stuff there was a very lively black market for hotel for the little drinks vouchers we were handing out so we could argue that their pleasure was increased not decreased by our leader little intervention what's important so
wretchedly however is that we had another experimental condition where on top of these we also explained the environmental benefits of these particular intervention and guess what no different so the knowledge that it's environmentally Gluck did not have the effect it was actually used equitable sharing of the well duh savings that control for the behavior we then debriefed me hotel stop off of this particular hotel on
to study and I asked them is there anything else we can do to make the operations of your hotel more environmentally friendly and they had a food and beverage yet serve yes results are gifts what's the story with Serbia's we don't know if there's a problem with Serbia whether reads if you go to a former five star hotel you sit down at the breakfast a fate
table at the okay you would find them very large and very sick cotton Soviets nicely folded on your plate the moment you touch it even if you just touch it to put it out of your way so you can eat this Serbia needs to be washed and it needs to be Iran's and we can put us forever we can do it about seventy maybe a hundred
times if we're lucky then it gets thrown away so it turns out that using a recycled paper one way Serbia use a lot more environmentally friendly been using defeat copy Sir it produces three times less CO two emissions and uses ten times less water to use a recycled paper Sir but the hotel was gone when they give their gas recycled paper Soviets after all it's a
for a five star within the guests have expectations so what we set out to do is figure out whether to guests were actually upset if we change the serviette at the breakfast buffet so what we did is we change the default we gave people and recycled Serbia instead of the corpus of yet and we had a little sign on the table explaining why we did that
and inviting them that if they felt strongly about a sycophant serviette they could go to the buffet and they could just grab one this little change in the fall to reduce the cost the servic use by ninety five percent and guess what the tourists were just as happy in fact it's not that they didn't realize we ask them and they were quite aware which kind of
serve yet they had but they just honestly could care less so what an easy way to reduce the impact %HESITATION on all of the tourism industry on the environment so you see we're having a lot of fun doing our little environmental experiments now what I didn't tell you today is all the failed once yeah and we've had a few but the ones that are successful are
very rude rewarding and well worth all the effort we put into it so what have we learned in terms of knowledge development well we've learned that the currency Yuri's switcher quite good at explaining and predicting and changing pro environmental behavior in the whole context fail catastrophically invocation why is that when we're at home and we save energy save money when we're at home we are very
much we are and when we're at home our neighbors are watching and judging us so our behavior is very much in line with our beliefs and with our values we go on vacation we save energy we don't save any money right we're still paying the same hotel rates we don't want to be the same old boring sentence we want to try something new we want to
be someone different just for a little while and the neighbors aren't watching so it's the perfect opportunity to be just a little bit more the consequence our values and our beliefs do not block aligned very well with our behaviors and trying to convince us preaching to us educating us doesn't work tourists need to be enticed to behave more environmentally and there's three ways we can do
that we can change the infrastructure like the example with the play itself out we can change the default like for example with our recycled so get show or we can give people a little reward for the desired behavior like the drinks voucher example with the room cleans shot but whatever we choose to do with the one thing we must not do is assume that tourists with
sacrifice pleasure enjoyment for the sake of the environment they re not we need to let have them the same level of enjoyment and the changes need to be painless for them that's the only way we can convince them what's the practical value of our research well if I eat my breakfast and if I wait my room clean and if I use a recycled serviette that makes