Tourism vs. residents on Vancouver Island

Vancouver Island is on a Goldilocks mission: trying to find just the right amount of visitors that keep both businesses and residents happy. For starters, it’s turned a group once responsible for marketing the island into one that works for residents to ensure “these great places to live are great places to visit,” said Brian Cant, acting CEO of 4VI (formerly Tourism Vancouver Island). For many Islanders, things had to change after a tourism boom in 2019 when an island with just over 80,000 residents hosted more than 10 million travellers. “A lot of residents on this island were very frustrated by what they felt was too many visitors,” Cant said. Part of 4VI’s efforts is to make life more sustainable by decarbonizing the visitors’ experience. Recently, the organization completed one of the largest tourism carbon audits in North America by going through the 2019 numbers. In that banner year, Vancouver Island’s visitors generated the carbon equivalent of 540,000 cars driving for a year. To reduce that number, Cant says 4VI is working on carbon-offset programs for tourism operators, as well as more tangible changes, such as creating a master map of EV charging stations on the island to encourage visitors to drive electric cars. There are also plans to create a carbon sink by planting seagrass and eelgrass in the ocean. Cant notes these are early steps to help cut Vancouver Island’s tourism emissions in half over the next decade.