Tourists grin for selfies in front of the gates of Auschwitz. They dive into the Trevi fountain in Rome. One man carved his name and his girlfriend’s — “Ivan + Hayley 23” — into the Roman Colosseum’s 2,000-year-old brick wall. A Russian influencer was deported from Bali with her husband after posting a nude picture of herself in front of a sacred 700-year-old banyan tree. In Amsterdam, stag parties wearing penis suits lie vomiting in gutters. All of them are helping change the climate, contributing to the current heatwave now afflicting much of southern Europe: tourist transportation causes about 5 per cent of global emissions, and rising.
Overtourism was becoming an issue in the last years before the pandemic. Now that international travel is reviving unexpectedly fast, it’s an issue again from Venice to Fiji — the popular Pacific destination where the word “overtourism” is googled far more than anywhere else on Earth.
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