The health, climate and tourism crisis

Following the webinar on 18 June 2020 on the return of cruise activity in our post-covid port cities, Dr. Pedro Marín Cots, Director of the Urban Environment Observatory of the city of Málaga (Spain), gives his point of view on the subject. In his characteristic direct style, he clearly thinks that they cannot return, especially following the same economic and tourist model from before the Covid-19. He raises several questions regarding the actual adaptation capacity and emphasizes that the real challenge is climate change, that we should not get distracted from it. This is indeed an opportunity to accelerate the necessary changes towards new economic and cultural behaviours. Dr. Pedro Marín Cots, director of OMAU, Málaga City Council. After the webinar on 18th June, in which Leghorn, Bourdeaux and Tangier Ville showed so transparently the situation affecting cruise ship tourism, our answer to the question raised by José Sánchez in the introductory article to the seminar has to be “No”. No, we are not ready to start again, at least not in the way that we have experienced this economic and tourism activity in the past. In the three ports mentioned above, the inhabitants are only now starting to recover the "new normality" after their confinement (in Tangier with a curfew); cruise ship activity has been similarly paralysed in all the ports of Europe and around the world. In Málaga, strict health protection protocols forbid cruise ships from docking, and practically all the cruise lines…