Climate Change, Gender and Indonesian tourism

Director Dr Stroma Cole on climate change and gender for International Women’s Day, hosted by Women in Tourism Indonesia

Women in Tourism Indonesia (WTID), a non-profit promoting women’s participation in tourism (and associate of Equality in Tourism), held a series of fascinating talks for International Women’s Day 2022. Dr Stroma’s presentation features with a number of other thought leaders in Indonesian tourism, focusing on the interconnection of climate change to gender and tourism in the country.

For those who speak Indonesian, you’re in luck as Dr Stroma delivers her talk in Indonesian. However, the slides themselves are in English and there’s a lot that can be learnt from them, so you can see them below

. The presentation begins with a strong reinforcement that we are seeing climate change affecting tourism in many ways already: climate change is here and now.

Stroma moves on to underline the varied impacts of climate change on tourist destinations: attractiveness to tourists; infrastructure; water supply and supply chains.

She then explores keys lessons learned from COVID: women are disproportionately affected by disasters due to precarious and informal employment; greater dependence on natural assets such as water and lower levels of access to information.

Finally, Stroma calls for the diversifying of livelihood strategies to avoid over-reliance on tourism; rebuiling the tourism industry in a truly sustainable way post-COVID and acknoweldgement of women’s skills in disaster recovery and resilience.

Watch the full talk here: Dr Stroma’s talk begins at 00:48 and ends at 01:17.