How regenerative tourism can help avert a sixth extinction

Dinosaurs vanished even without humans around to hasten their demise. Today, man-made threats such as climate change and pollution threaten to erase one out of every four of the world’s plant and animal species.

It’s a chilling prospect, and the threat is accelerating. Some biologists worry that half of all living species could be wiped out within 100 years. Amphibians and corals are among those most at risk in our Anthropocene era — a term that scientists use to describe the current, human-dominated phase of Earth’s existence. 

Our planet’s last great extinction, its fifth, occurred some 66 million years ago and killed an estimated three-quarters of all organisms, including the dinosaurs. To help avert a sixth extinction, delegates from more than 190 countries met at the COP15 international biodiversity summit in Montreal in December. After much discussion, they agreed to set the first quantitative targets for biodiversity. One key goal is for nations to safeguard and restore 30 percent of the world’s land and sea areas by 2030.

Three years ago, my company, developer Red Sea Global, set a similar goal of enhancing the natural environment when we began developing a pristine section of Saudi Arabia’s western coast. That’s where we’re creating two major tourism destinations — The Red Sea and Amaala — and doing it with nature at the heart of every decision we make.

All too often, costal developments have a negative impact on wildlife and natural habitats. And the tourism industry isn’t renowned for sustainability, not least because of its association with aviation, which generates 17 percent of tourism-related carbon emissions, according to the World Travel & Tourism Council.

I believe Red Sea Global has a unique opportunity to both protect our precious environment and enhance it, through regenerative tourism, focused on adding a positive impact to the local community and environment. Our remit spans a Belgium-sized area of mountains, desert, more than 90 islands and the world’s fourth-largest coral reef. We realized that our most valuable asset was nature, so before we stuck our first shovel in the ground, we asked scientists to catalog and assess the plants and animals living at our project site.

This matters. Homo sapiens won’t have much of a future as a species unless we act to safeguard and support biodiversity.

Deferring to turtles for site development    

For The Red Sea project, one of our first steps was to assess a lagoon at the heart of our site. We sectioned off all 1,294 square miles of this lagoon into a grid, including its coral, mangrove and seagrass habitats. We consulted marine experts to assign a conservation value to each block of this virtual grid. Our research team then drew up a list of actions to help ease pressure on the lagoon’s environment, from cleaning beaches to rebuilding fish stocks.

Based on our findings, we decided to develop only 22 of our islands and to leave the other three-quarters of them untouched. We also designated nine islands as special conservation zones. One of them would have made a spectacular setting for a hotel except that it was a favorite nesting ground for the critically endangered Hawksbill sea turtle. So, we deferred to the turtles.

In a separate effort, we surveyed the wildlife populations and habitats of 124 miles of coastline. No property developer has ever conducted a bigger environmental survey. One of our scientists visited all 92 of our islands on foot — and she did it twice (wearing out five pairs of shoes in the process).

Red Sea Global is addressing or making progress toward all 20 of the COP15 biodiversity targets that are relevant to our business.

Biodiversity is important for its own sake, but humans also benefit directly from it. Certain species of frogs and toads, for example, secrete toxins that scientists have used to develop medicines, including treatments for cancer and AIDS. As human diseases become increasingly resistant to antibiotics, amphibians like these offer great and largely unexplored potential for the development of new drugs. However, amphibians also happen to be the world’s most endangered class of vertebrates; 41 percent of these species face extinction, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.

Red Sea Global is setting new standards for the tourism industry. Prior to the pandemic, travel and tourism accounted for 10.3 percent of global GDP and one in four of all new jobs, says the World Travel & Tourism Council. By teaming up with like-minded hotel o