Queenstown, New Zealand just committed to going carbon negative for their entire tourism industry by 2030.
The Mayor of Queenstown and its tourism leaders are "committed to removing carbon and not using offsetting as a solution." Wow! Congrats to Rodney Payne who led this initiative towards unlocking New Zealand to go carbon negative. Tourism has a massive carbon footprint and committing to make it carbon negative is a big move.
Something else in the press release caught my attention. "we’re ready to be that testbed, we’re ready to be that first adopter of new innovations to achieve it."
This idea of a testbed for carbon removal is super exciting. Imagine the entire island chain deploys full stack, localized carbon negative solutions that integrate society-wide. Air, soil, land, ocean, products, storage. So deeply integrated that it's a norm. "Carbon negative, yeah of course, how else would we live?". Going bigger, I’m imagining a worldwide network of global labs testing out and integrating carbon removal together. Take a holiday to the world's carbon removal hubs and make your whole trip 2x carbon negative.
If carbon removal tourism is a thing, then Neesha Mirchandani is one of the first carbon removal tourists! She went to Iceland this week and stopped by the Climeworks + CarbFix plant for a tour. See her pictures here on Slack of the tour.
Do you want your city or country to be the next carbon removal testbed? Would you move to New Zeland to help build out the first testbed there? Hit reply.
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