Team member: Yordanos Girmay, Zeyu Hu, Natasha Santos, Sara Trigoboff, Francis Wang, Esther Xie
Submitted to: Office of the Prime Minister, Kingdom of Tonga
TONGA
Spring 2019
International Planning and Development Workshop
Imagine Tonga has become world famous for its natural beauty, whale watching, and rich culture. Flights from China increase from once a week to three times a week. There are now up to 600,000 tourists per year excited to soak up the Tongan sun. However, the rise of tourism can exacerbate many existing issues and cause new issues, such as water shortage, hastening coastal erosion, increasing vulnerability to cyclones, and tension between local residents and foreign labors.
Tonga is at the precipice of a projected massive increase of its tourism sector. Tourism could prove a boon to the country’s economy, allowing it to invest in necessary climate-related resiliency upgrades and improved infrastructure. However, it could also produce some of the issues described above, or even worse. Our guiding questions in this project are:
- What decisions and policies should be pursued now so that tourism supports other policy goals around climate change?
- How can we ensure that Tonga maximizes broadly distributed benefits for the Tongan people from the projected increases in tourism?
- What are some potential unforeseen negative impacts of tourism?
