By Ben Lynam, Head of Communications & Research, Travel Forward

What would happen to your visitor economy if the natural systems it quietly relies on stopped working quite so well?

Not disappeared. Not collapsed overnight. Just became a little less reliable.

Perhaps water became scarcer and more expensive. Summer heat became harder to manage. Flooding happened more often. Beaches eroded faster. Forests became more vulnerable to fire. Or the landscapes, wildlife, and ecosystems that help define the destination gradually became less attractive or less resilient.

For many destinations, nature is part of the product. But it is also much more than that. It is part of the infrastructure that allows the visitor economy to function. And much of that infrastructure is effectively invisible to us until something starts to go wrong.

Nature is not a niche tourism issue

It is easy to think about nature and tourism primarily in terms of national parks, wildlife watching, coral reefs, or outdoor adventure. Clearly, these destinations and experiences have particularly obvious dependencies on healthy natural systems. But virtually every destination depends on nature in some form.

Natural systems provide water, regulate temperature, absorb rainfall, help protect coastlines, support food production, and contribute to the quality and character of the places people visit. In cities, trees and green spaces can provide shade and cooling. In coastal destinations, reefs, dunes, wetlands, and mangroves can help reduce exposure to waves and flooding.

These are not simply environmental benefits. They can influence operating costs, infrastructure requirements, visitor comfort and safety, business continuity, and ultimately destination competitiveness.

This matters because the pressures on those systems are growing. In the World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report 2026, the three most severe risks over the next ten years are all environmental: extreme weather, biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, and critical change to Earth systems.

That dependence extends much further than obviously nature-based tourism. According to the World Travel and Tourism Council, more than 80% of travel and tourism goods and services rely directly or indirectly on nature's resources and functioning ecosystems. In other words, much of tourism's exposure to nature loss sits outside the parts of the system that destinations and businesses see most clearly.

The useful question isn't how important is nature, but what does our visitor economy rely on nature for? And what happens if that falters?

Sometimes the dependency only becomes obvious when it is tested

Cape Town provides a striking example. Between 2015 and 2017, the region experienced its driest three-year period since the 1930s. By 2018, the city was preparing for the possibility of "Day Zero", when most of the municipal water supply would have been switched off. The crisis was ultimately averted, but Cape Town's own resilience strategy records reduced tourist arrivals and damage to the city's investment profile - showing how water insecurity can quickly become a visitor economy and destination reputation risk.

Water was not a tourism attraction. But the close connection between the visitor economy and the functioning of the natural and urban water system was suddenly very visible.

Cape Town has since diversified its approach to water supply and resilience, while Cape Town Tourism continues to make water stewardship part of its responsible tourism work.

Changes in natural systems can also directly affect the visitor experience. Along Mexico's Caribbean coast, destinations including Cancún, Playa del Carmen, Tulum, and Puerto Morelos have had to respond to increasingly disruptive arrivals of sargassum, a floating brown seaweed. Large accumulations can cover beaches, restrict access to the sea and create strong odours as they decompose, turning an ecological change into an immediate tourism-management issue.

Quintana Roo has responded with a coordinated programme involving government, the Mexican Navy, municipalities, tourism businesses, and NGOs. In 2024 alone, nearly 37,000 tonnes of sargassum were collected from beaches and shallow waters, supported by offshore barriers, specialist collection vessels and more than MXN$125 million of public investment. In places such as Puerto Morelos, some of the collected material has been processed into compost, while local environmental levy funding has also been used to purchase beach cleaning equipment. The response shows what happens when a change in nature becomes material to the visitor economy: understanding the problem is only the start. It then requires coordination, investment, and adaptation.

There is also an information flow problem

Here is another challenge that we have encountered as we have started exploring this work. The people who understand the state of nature are not usually the people who understand the visitor economy.

A national park authority, conservation organisation, or environmental agency may have excellent evidence about the health of ecosystems, species, habitats, and landscapes. It may know where conditions are deteriorating and why. But it will have relatively little information about what that means for tourism demand, tourism businesses, visitor flows, local livelihoods, or destination reputation.

The DMO often has the opposite problem. It understands visitors, businesses, markets, and the destination proposition, but may have little visibility of the ecological systems underpinning them.

Bringing those two forms of intelligence together could be extremely valuable. It can also create a more useful conversation between tourism and nature managers. Tourism is not simply dependent on nature. It can also put pressure on it through visitor concentrations, development, water use, waste, access, and other impacts. So, this relationship runs in both directions.

A good understanding of nature risk therefore needs to ask both how is tourism affecting nature? And how could changes in nature affect tourism?

The Great Barrier Reef shows what that relationship can look like

The Great Barrier Reef provides an interesting example because tourism operators are not simply users of the natural asset, they have become part of its intelligence and management system.

Through the Australian Government's Tourism Reef Protection Initiative and the Reef Authority's Eye on the Reef programme, tourism operators collect regular information on reef health and environmental impacts. Their near-continuous presence on the water means they can contribute near-real-time evidence during and after events such as marine heatwaves, cyclones and flooding. That information feeds directly into reef management and reporting.

The Australian Government has continued to fund the initiative, with a further AUS$5 million committed in May 2026 to continue protection work with tourism operators. It is a useful model of tourism and nature managers recognising that they have a shared interest in understanding how the system is changing. And the economic stakes are significant; tourism associated with the Great Barrier Reef generates around A$7.9 billion a year and supports around 77,000 jobs. That makes protecting the health of the Reef not just an environmental priority, but an economic and investment one too.

Better intelligence can also help make the case for investment

There is another reason for destinations to understand these dependencies. Significant finance is already moving towards nature. UNEP estimates that around US$220 billion a year currently supports nature-based solutions, and multilateral development banks are also increasing their nature finance. The opportunity for tourism is to become part of that picture, not by making the case for money to support tourism, but by showing how investment through tourism can deliver on the goals that climate and nature finance are already seeking: resilient communities, restored ecosystems, and reduced climate risk.

Tourism is starting to enter that conversation. The Coastal Tourism Breakthrough, for example, looks at how tourism can be used as a lever for conservation and climate action in coastal destinations. WTTC estimates that coastal and marine tourism could require up to 65 billion dollars a year in mitigation and adaptation investment. This September, during Climate Week NYC, both WTTC, with Iberostar, and Travel Forward, with Cornell and Edinburgh universities, are convening separate but complementary conversations on how finance can support more resilient destinations and stronger outcomes for nature and communities. Travel Forward's focus is on how to translate destination risks and needs into projects that investors, public funders, and other finance providers can recognise and support.

Making the invisible visible

This is the thinking behind Nature RiskScan, a new strand of work that Travel Forward is developing with risk scientists at Risklayer and other partners. We want to help destinations connect evidence about the condition of nature with the things that tourism actually depends upon.

That means starting with the natural assets and systems in a destination, understanding their condition and the pressures affecting them, and then tracing the consequences through to three areas:

• Demand and competitiveness: Could changes in nature affect why people visit, the experiences available to them or the attractiveness of the destination?
• Operations and assets: What could they mean for water, infrastructure, access, operating conditions, and tourism businesses?
• Livelihoods and benefits: Which communities, jobs, and local economic benefits depend particularly heavily on those natural systems?

From there, destinations can start to identify which risks deserve attention and where intervention could produce benefits for both tourism and nature.

We are at the beginning of this work, which is why we are interested in hearing from destinations that would like to help us shape and test the approach.

The most important parts of a destination's tourism infrastructure may not always appear on an asset register. Sometimes they are the systems quietly working in the background. Understanding them before they stop working quite so well is surely a better strategy than discovering their value afterwards.