Opinion | Climate Change Is Killing the Sun-Seeking Summer Vacation

The images emerging from the Mediterranean in late July resembled a fixture of the evening news: the desperate crowd fleeing adversity. But these fugitives walking along hot tarmac or waiting to board rescue boats in the night were not the displaced victims of a broken republic. These were pleasure seekers in flip-flops and tank tops, toting beach bags over sun-tanned shoulders, retreating from a glowing sky.

On the Greek island of Rhodes, the peak summer travel season had arrived, and with it had materialized a hapless avatar of the times, the tourist-turned-evacuee.

More than any past year, this summer felt like the moment that climate change came for the vacationer. It began with heat waves across Southern Europe, where popular attractions closed to avoid the intolerable midafternoon temperatures. The infernal heat cured the kindling for wildfires, which were soon raging in Italy, Turkey, Spain, Portugal, Cyprus, Greece and elsewhere, forcing holiday cancellations and, as in the case of Rhodes, large-scale evacuations. On the other side of the world, another fire, this one likely supercharged by hurricane winds, consumed Lahaina on Maui, killing at least 115 people.

Hail as big as tennis balls pounded towns in northern Italy. Torrential rain triggered flash floods across Central Europe. All of this wild weather has coincided with tourism’s great rebound, the year when tourist numbers are expected to recover to prepandemic levels.

What should we make of this chaotic summer? The kind of headline-grabbing ordeals endured by some travelers — not to mention the people and communities they visited — in recent months has remained the exception rather than the rule. Nonetheless, watching the Northern Hemisphere’s prime months of recreation play out against a backdrop of calamity has seeded a sentiment that is hard to shake: that the hallowed sun-seeking summer holiday might soon be incompatible with a warming world.

In order to appreciate the gravity of this prospect, it helps to trace the summer vacation’s deep roots. The type of high-volume tourism that dominates the scene in Europe’s Mediterranean rivieras has its origins in the 19th century, during which the experience of my country, Britain, was prototypical.

As rapid industrialization codified the working week in Britain’s burgeoning factories, the more structured calendar gave rise to statutory time off. Gradually, the concept of taking holidays evolved from being the preserve of the wealthy to a worker’s right. By the middle of the 20th century, this social evolution had birthed working-class beach resorts across Britain’s temperate coastlines. Starting in the 1950s, as the first package tours alighted in places like Palma and the Costa Brava, the British quickly grew to covet an ingredient that their inclement islands struggled to dependably provide: sunshine.

In subsequent decades, the convention for people, especially those from cooler northern latitudes, to journey abroad in pursuit of warm weather has become a fixed point on the calendar, as well as on our mental maps of well-being.

There are few contingencies in motion for when the weather in today’s most popular destinations becomes a bane rather than a blessing. Many people are speculating that European summer travel patterns are bound to migrate north as prospective vacationers deem an increasing likelihood of sustained 110-degree Fahrenheit temperatures too much to bear. Uncanny sights like the ghostly hotel towers of Varosha, a once-glamorous resort in Cyprus that was abandoned after the Turkish invasion of 1974, may become commonplace across Europe’s southern coasts.

Arguably as consequential is the way that this shift promises to subvert our assumptions about how we should pursue happiness — and the very legitimacy of chasing contentment abroad.

As a general rule, the response of tourists to upheaval is a barometer of a destination’s perceived stability. A single disaster or atrocity in a well-known holiday spot particularly scars the public consciousness because we tend to fixate on those who have been caught in moments of maximum repose. Such events can devastate a region’s reputation, and the revival of its inbound tourism market can often track its broader social and economic recovery. The difference here is that such catastrophes have codas. The future of the climate crisis portends the far grimmer prospect of disruption without end. As such, this summer has highlighted a facet of that future that remains difficult to countenance: the inexorable complication of leisure, the dissolution of fun.

Placed alongside the more mortal implications of catastrophic shifts in our climate, the upending of vacation plans might seem trivial. However, it reveals something about climate change’s totalizing potential and the extent to which persistently violent and volatile weather might compromise our quality of life. Much of the solace we derive from a vacation resides in the anticipation. It is the light on the horizon, part of a cycle of work and reward that underpins society.

“It is a crucial element of modern life to feel that travel and holidays are necessary,” wrote John Urry in “The Tourist Gaze,” his seminal work on the sociology of contemporary tourism. “‘I need a holiday’ is the surest reflection of a modern discourse based on the idea that people’s physical and mental health will be restored if only they can ‘get away’ from time to time.”

Envisioning a society in which the traditional season of respite becomes a season when we instead brace for impact is a dizzying exercise. In some places, domestic tourist sectors could regenerate as people recognize that the demand for spontaneity is better served by destinations close to home. In turn, foreign vacations may become incrementally more rarefied, the preserve, once again, of the affluent classes that can afford to alter plans on short notice. But in every case, it will become harder to see our best-laid plans through to fruition, and that threatens the foundations of hope.

Consequently, we all have cause to ask: What kind of life will it be? If the vacation is a keystone of the individual pursuit of gratification and a marker of relative wealth, its circumscription should remind us that no one is fully immune from the emotional toll of extreme weather. Climate change might not flood your house. But it may very well erode the things that give you joy.

Moreover, there are broader ethical issues at stake. In an age of overtourism and environmental collapse, it’s tempting to see modern tourists as an emblem of human hubris and self-satisfaction, bent on personal pleasure while the world burns. The profound dissonance of people seeking hedonism in places reeling from flood or fire has provided further grist to the mill of anti-tourist resentments that have been festering for some time. In Hawaii the devastating Maui wildfire has reanimated longstanding tensions about the costs imposed on the archipelago’s inhabitants by large-scale tourism and its wanton excess, which so often upsets the cadences of local life and reroutes resources from local communities. This conversation is set to run and run.

It is difficult to forecast what repercussions the havoc of the summer of 2023 will have on next year’s season. It seems fair to suppose that an existential threat to August escapes to the Mediterranean, far more than news of barely survivable conditions in rural India, will help to bring home the immediacy of the climate crisis to people who might otherwise prefer to ignore it.

But many of us will still be reluctant to confront the idea of forsaking that precious bright spot in the calendar. Vacations have long been marketed to us as a reprieve, a time to suspend daily worries and consume with abandon. In short, it is the time when we unplug from reality. But reality, like a wildfire, has a way of catching up with those who fail to heed the smoke.

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Henry Wismayer is a writer based in London.