Acadia University professor and a long-time adventure guide will kick off the conference with a session that provides a clear-eyed overview of the current state of our climate.
Grounded in science and the latest global and regional data, the Climate Reality Check sets the tone for the conference by highlighting the risks, challenges, and opportunities facing the tourism industry. It’s a moment to align our understanding, confront the realities of climate change, and frame the urgency and focus needed for the discussions ahead.
The world is increasingly volatile. UNEP’s Limiting Overshoot report confirms that exceeding 1.5°C is now widely considered unavoidable. The report frames this not as a reason to resign, but as an urgent call to act. That posture is exactly what tourism needs. Amid shifting geopolitics, economic uncertainty, and fractured stances, a regenerative approach can be the solution. Thought leaders will explore where the industry stands amid global uncertainty, and what it truly takes to lead, not just advocate, for a regenerative model when the broader world seems to be moving the other way.
Regenerative tourism has no shortage of believers — what it needs more of is implementers. Destination Management Organizations sit at a unique pressure point: they’re expected to champion long-term, holistic thinking while managing the day-to-day realities of budgets, stakeholders, infrastructure, and visitor demand. This panel moves past the “why” of regenerative tourism and goes straight to the “how,” bringing together DMO leaders who are actively translating the model into policy, funding decisions, and on-the-ground practice. Expect a candid look at what implementation actually requires — the trade-offs, the resistance, and the tactics that have worked.
Tourism touches the world’s most sensitive landscapes, Indigenous territories, and living systems. And yet, it still operates under an extractive model. Drawing from the principles in Carbon: The Book of Life, this talk explores how the industry can move beyond “sustainability” and “net zero” into regeneration. By understanding carbon not as waste but as the connective tissue of life, tourism leaders can begin to design experiences, operations, and business models that actively contribute to the health of the places and communities they depend on.
Tourism has always carried an element of risk—but the nature of that risk is changing fast. Climate volatility is reshaping where and when travel is even possible, from vanishing ski seasons to extreme heat, wildfire smoke, and shifting hurricane patterns. At the same time, health considerations—from pandemic aftershocks to heat-related illness to the strain of travel on remote medical infrastructure—are forcing operators to rethink duty of care in ways that didn’t exist a decade ago. This panel examines how tourism businesses, destinations, and insurers are adapting to a risk landscape that’s no longer predictable, exploring what resilience actually looks like when the old models of risk assessment no longer apply.
Innovation doesn’t always come from inside the industry looking to solve its own problems—sometimes the best solutions already exist, just waiting to be applied to a new context. In this fast-paced, Pecha Kucha–style session, four innovators from outside the tourism sector take the stage for seven minutes each to present technologies and solutions built for entirely different industries—and make the case for how they could reshape travel, hospitality, or conservation. Rapid, visual, and to the point, this session is designed to spark cross-industry thinking and leave attendees with concrete new ideas to bring back to their own work.
Before a traveler ever reaches a regenerative destination, they pass through a chain of transportation touchpoints—airports, shuttles, taxis, ferries, rideshares—that shape their expectations long before arrival. Too often, these gateways are treated as neutral infrastructure: a means of getting from point A to point B, disconnected from the values of the destination they lead to. But transportation providers are the traveler’s first and last point of contact, uniquely positioned to set the tone, model regenerative practices, and begin the educational journey before a guest ever steps foot on the land they came to experience. This panel explores what it means for transportation to embody regenerative principles itself—not just facilitate access to them—creating a seamless, values-aligned journey from the very first mile.
Tourism has always been shaped by change. Today, organizations are navigating far more than seasonal demand. Wildfires, staffing shortages, economic uncertainty, and evolving visitor expectations have made disruption part of the landscape. While most organizations prepare operationally, far fewer intentionally prepare the people, leadership practices, and workplace systems that determine how well teams respond when plans change.
Grounded in the National Standard of Canada for Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace, this interactive session explores how tourism organizations can strengthen organizational readiness before disruption occurs. Through personal stories, practical tourism scenarios, and facilitated discussion, participants will discover practical ways to reduce avoidable stress, strengthen communication, and build resilient teams.
Rather than asking people to become more resilient, this session explores how organizations can create the conditions that make resilience possible.
Food is one of the most visible, and most overlooked, touchpoints in the tourism experience. Every meal served to a traveler carries a hidden system behind it: where ingredients are grown, who grows them, how far they travel, and what impact that supply chain has on the land and communities that sustain it. As tourism moves toward more regenerative models, food offers one of the clearest opportunities to align guest experience with ecological and economic resilience—from farm partnerships and local sourcing to menu design that tells the story of a place rather than importing a generic one. This panel explores what it takes to rebuild tourism’s food systems from the ground up: connecting soil health, local agriculture, and culinary experience into a model that nourishes both travelers and the destinations they visit.
Tourism’s next chapter won’t be written by one generation alone. As the industry shifts toward regenerative models, prioritizing long-term ecological and community health over short-term growth, the question of who leads that shift, and how leadership transfers, becomes urgent. Longtime operators, guides, and land stewards hold decades of hard-won knowledge about place, culture, and guest relationships; a new generation brings fresh urgency, different tools, and a redefined sense of what “success” in tourism should mean. This panel explores what it takes to bridge that gap, not as a handoff of authority, but as an active collaboration, so that the wisdom of experience and the energy of new leadership can shape a more resilient, regenerative future for the industry together.
The previous panel conversation raises the big questions—but what does the next generation actually think? In this moderated discussion, two students step into the spotlight to share their own perspectives on regenerative tourism, career paths in the industry, and what they hope to inherit—and change—as they enter the field. Rather than speaking about young people, this session lets them speak for themselves, offering a candid, unscripted look at how emerging voices are approaching an industry in transition.
As untouched landscapes grow rarer, a new kind of tourism is emerging—one that treats darkness, silence, and wildness not as absences to be developed away, but as assets worth protecting. From dark sky festivals to remote wilderness expeditions, adventure tourism is proving that ecosystems can generate more value intact than extracted. This panel brings together voices from conservation, tourism, and local economic development to explore how adventure tourism can serve as both a conservation strategy and an educational tool—offering communities a viable alternative to resource extraction while deepening travelers’ connection to the places they visit.
Ten years ago, “regenerative tourism” was a fringe idea—today, it’s reshaping how destinations, operators, and travelers think about the industry’s future. This panel brings together longtime IMPACT community members and early adopters who have built their businesses around regenerative principles from the ground up, offering a firsthand look at how the model has evolved from concept to practice over the past decade. Together, they’ll reflect on what’s worked, what’s shifted, and what hard lessons shaped the movement—while looking ahead to what the next ten years demand of an industry still learning how to grow without extracting.