Behavioural adaptation to climate change among winter alpine tourists: an analysis of tourist motivations and leisure substitutability

Understanding market responses to climate change impacts has important implications for the sustainability of Australia's winter tourism destinations. Utilising a framework incorporating push–pull tourist motivations and the theory of leisure substitutability, this study sought to explore how winter tourists in Australia will adapt to changes in snow cover in Australia's alpine regions under future climate change scenarios. The results of a questionnaire completed by 231 respondents indicated that tourist motivations were related to behavioural adaptation, and that there is a general preference among the current winter market for spatial substitution in the event of poor snow. Those motivated by recreation specialisation or snow-related attributes were likely to opt for spatial substitution, while tourists motivated by self-expression and après ski activities displayed resilience to poor snow conditions. The results demonstrate a clear division between leisure-driven tourists who valued participation in sport, and experience-driven tourists, who displayed higher resilience to reduced snow under projected climate change scenarios. These results have practical implications for winter tourism destinations, both in terms of targeting experience-driven tourists in the case of reduced snow as well as the longer term sustainability and viability of winter tourism destinations.     

Interactions between climate change and the tourism sector: Multiple-criteria decision analysis to assess mitigation and adaptation options in tourism areas

Tourism is one of the most climate-sensitive economic sectors, but also a contributor to climate change. With the effects of climate change becoming an increasing concern, the tourism sector must urgently and realistically respond by mitigating its emissions and adapting tourism businesses and destinations to the changing climate conditions. This work presents a generic methodological framework to plan, manage and implement climate change mitigation and adaptation measures in the tourism context. The methodological scheme is based on Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis for prioritizing available options applicable to a defined tourism area. The proposed framework is implemented for Greece, one of the world's most popular tourism destinations, and optimally ranks 18 mitigation and 16 adaptation measures under 4 criteria i.e. environmental benefit, applicability, cost and social acceptance. The analysis indicates that rational energy use, improvement of energy efficiency and water management/saving measures should be primarily put forward for the Greek case.     

Current issues in tourism: Mitigating climate change in sustainable tourism research

This paper adopts a problematising review approach to examine the extent of mitigating climate change research in the sustainable tourism literature. As climate change has developed into an existential global environmental crisis and while tourism's emissions are still increasing, one would expect it to be at the heart of sustainable tourism research. However, from a corpus of 2573 journal articles featuring ‘sustainable tourism’ in their title, abstract, or keywords, only 6.5% covered climate change mitigation. Our critical content analysis of 35 of the most influential papers found that the current methods, scope and traditions of tourism research hamper effective and in-depth research into climate change. Transport, the greatest contributor to tourism's emissions, was mostly overlooked, and weak definitions of sustainability were common. Tight system boundaries, lack of common definitions and incomplete data within tourism studies appear to hamper assessing ways to mitigate tourism's contribution to climate change.     

Sustainable tourism implementation in urban areas: a case study of London

Sustainable tourism is a concept widely embraced by managers and planners of tourist destinations. However, it has received little attention in the context of urban tourism, an area of research that has until recently been largely neglected by academics. This paper contributes to the body of knowledge on sustainable tourism implementation in large cities, by using London as an exploratory case study. Through the collection and analysis of both primary and secondary data (online survey, semi-structured interviews and document analysis), it seeks to explore whether local authorities have implemented policies towards sustainable tourism in the capital. The findings indicate that although the concept of sustainable tourism is perceived as important by policy makers, only a few local authorities in London promote its principles in their policy documents and even fewer have initiatives to put them in practice. Most of these initiatives are isolated activities which address limited aspects of sustainable tourism. The paper concludes that despite some progress made to date, in the current economic climate, growth and development remain the main objectives of governments and local authorities, while social and environmental issues are often left behind.     

Climate change and tourism: a scientometric analysis using CiteSpace

The interaction between climate change and tourism has been one of the most critical and dynamic research areas in the field of sustainable tourism in recent years. In this paper, a scientometric analysis of 976 academic publications between 1990 and 2015 related to climate change and tourism is presented to characterize the intellectual landscape by identifying and visualizing the evolution of the collaboration network, the co-citation network, and emerging trends. The results show that the number of publications in this field has increased rapidly and it has become an increasingly interdisciplinary research subject. The most productive authors and institutions in this subject area are in Australia, USA, Canada, New Zealand, and European countries. In this paper, we identify the most pressing topics of climate change and tourism research, as represented in the existing literature, which include the consequences of climate change for tourism, necessary adaptations, the vulnerability of the tourism industry, tourist behaviour and demand in response to climate change, and emission reductions in the tourism sector. The paper presents an in-depth analysis of climate change and tourism research to better understand global trends and directions in this field that have emerged over the past 25 years.     

Environmental change,resilience, and adaptation in nature-based tourism: conceptualizing the social-ecological resilience of birdwatching tour operations

Resilience theory has emerged as a holistic concept well suited to analyzing tourism systems and which promises important insights into the sustainability of tourism destinations in the face of accelerating global environmental change (GEC). This article presents empirical research into the social-ecological resilience of tour operators using the case study destination of the Otago Peninsula, Dunedin, New Zealand. It addresses the following research question: How do birdwatching tour operators build resilience to drivers of environmental change, including climatic drivers, into their operations? Qualitative interviews with providers of a specific nature tourism sector activity – birdwatching – were conducted with stakeholders including tour operators, conservation organizations, and local government members. The findings highlight current and possible future challenges to birdwatching tourism on the Otago Peninsula. The paper introduces a conceptual framework which highlights the tour operators’ main coping strategies in response to key perceived social-ecological system (SES) drivers of change. Overall, tour operators perceived their main social-ecological resilience to be the diversity of the species of the Otago Peninsula, their business experience, and the strength of their local stakeholder network to respond to SES crises.     

Perceptions of climate change impacts,adaptation and limits to adaption in the Australian Alps: the ski-tourism industry and key stakeholders

This paper explores perceptions of ski-tourism representatives and other regional stakeholders about climate change impacts, limits to tourism development and adaptation strategies in the Australian Alps. This area faces rising temperatures, declining rain and snow falls, and shorter skiing seasons. Open-ended interviews examined the perceptions, plans and attitudes of the ski industry and those of conservation managers, local government officials and Australian researchers into tourism and/or climate change effects in the Australian Alps. All interviewees accepted climate change was a reality; several, however, questioned the worst-case scenarios. The major tourism-related adaptation strategies were snowmaking and diversifying to year-round tourism; the success of these strategies will vary according to individual resorts’ snowmaking capacity and potential summer tourism revenue. Currently non-snow-based tourism revenue is worth only approximately 30% of winter revenue. Social resistance to increased water and electricity use for snowmaking emerged as an important issue. Competition for water, including the needs of ecosystems, agriculture and fire protection in this summer-fire-prone region, and fire management issues, is a key concern. Current conflicts between the ski industry and other stakeholders over climate change adaptation call for a collaborative adaptation and change policy within the Australian Alps.     

Human resources development for tourism in rural communities: A case study of Kerala

Considering the relative backwardness of rural areas, human resources development (HRD) seems to have a very important role in rural tourism development. However, tourism HRD in rural communities is affected by a number of drawbacks. In the absence of any significant private sector presence, especially during initial stages, the public sector need to take the initiative in equipping and empowering the local community to meaningfully participate in tourism. This paper suggests a multi‐pronged approach to educate and empower the members of the host community, the tourism industry personnel, and visitors to facilitate rural tourism development, which is sustainability‐oriented and can help localize the benefits. The experience of Kerala provides an example of how the public sector initiated HRD activities could contribute to the development of rural tourism, especially in engendering local entrepreneurial endeavors and giving tourism a higher profile. The Kerala experience represents some of the issues in HRD for rural tourism and suggests potential strategies for other rural communities involved in tourism development.     

The impacts of climate change on tourist mobility in mountain areas

This study investigates the effects of climate change on tourist mobility in mountain areas, distinguishing between infrastructure, transport operation and travel demand. We examine change in tourist travel demand by proposing a two-step approach to forecast its future development. A multi-origin, multi-destination model for tourism demand quantifies the variation in overnight stays within a given region, and a linear, deterministic model determines the traffic-related implications. The method, tested on the Autonomous Province of South Tyrol (Italy), exhibits expected variations in winter and summer travel demand up to 2080 under different scenarios. Results reveal that average summer traffic can be more than twice as intense as average winter traffic, contributing to significantly increasing the peak days of congestion along the Provincial road network. Despite this evidence, all stakeholders seem to be at an early stage in incorporating this information into their strategic planning. The need for adequate transport policies and measures is considered essential to obtain the optimal balance of transport modes that will be required in the near future.     

Changes in demand for tourism with climate change: a case study of visitation patterns to six ski resorts in Australia

Tourism in ski resorts depends on snow cover which is expected to decline with climate change. This paper explores hypotheses about demand side responses to climatic change by analyzing patterns of visitation in recent years with differing snow cover. Snow cover and visitation patterns to six resorts which differ in altitude and size in Victoria, Australia, were compared between a slightly warm and much drier year (2006, +0.6°C and ?50% precipitation to longer-term averages) to a more typical year (2007) and to nine earlier years. Snowmaking partly offset declines in natural snow cover in 2006, although there were still fewer days with snow on the ground. The number of visitor days was much lower in 2006 than the previous nine years for the three lowest-altitude resorts (?69%), while it actually increased (+10%) in the highest altitude resort where there were fewer visitors (?17%), but they stayed longer. Snowmaking is already critical for ski resorts in low snow years. With warmer conditions, lower-altitude resorts may not receive enough income due to reduced visitation to offset snowmaking costs, while higher-altitude resorts may have a short-term gain, but become uneconomical in the longer term.     

Social learning and sustainable tourism development; local quality conventions in tourism: a Greek case study

This paper presents the trajectory of an innovative organisational scheme, the Local Quality Convention (LQC), concerning sustainable tourism development in the Lake Plastiras area, a less favoured area in Central Greece. It outlines the development issues of the area, the main actors, their views and practices and describes the creation, progress and emerging problems of the LQC scheme. Research reveals contradicting approaches to sustainable tourism development which, in turn, influenced the LQC's evolution. The findings are critically discussed in the light of the Social Learning (SL) approach to social change and sustainable development. According to SL it is only through interactive (participative), concerted action that stakeholders are able to co-construct an issue and its solutions. Given the dominance of “conventional” tourism in Greece as well as the top-down formation and implementation of policies, the importance of the long term facilitation of local stakeholders to achieve sustainable tourism development is demonstrated, along with other related lessons for planners and managers.     

Ski tourism in a warmer world: Increased adaptation and regional economic impacts in Austria

Climate change risk has gained considerable attention within the ski industry and its investors. Several past studies have overlooked the adaptive capacity of snowmaking and within-season demand variation and therefore overestimated climate change impacts. This study of the Austrian ski market (208 ski areas) including snowmaking found impacts are substantial and spatially highly differentiated, but nonetheless manageable (season length losses of 10–16%) for the majority of ski areas until the 2050s under a high emissions pathway (RCP 8.5) or even the 2080s in a low emission pathway (RCP 4.5). The economic impacts of reduced operations are largely concentrated in regions less dependent on tourism. Preserving this sector in high-risk areas can be considered maladaptive, but may be important to maintain demand. A sustainable end-of-century future for a high proportion of Austria's ski areas is dependent on achieving the low-emission future set out in the Paris Climate Agreement.     

Climate change in Northern Sweden: intra-regional perceptions of vulnerability among winter-oriented tourism businesses

Climate change is a potential threat to society and business. Although research has noted that the tourism sector may be robust on the macro scale, significant losses at local levels have been suggested. This paper examines Upper Norrland, in Northern Sweden, by measuring the perceptions of winter-oriented tourism entrepreneurs. Their perceptions of potential threats from climate change are assessed, including how entrepreneurs view the future, in terms of climate change impacts and sustainability of the region as a winter-tourism destination. A quantitative survey of entrepreneurs (n = 63) gave responses along geographical and operator dimensions to reveal local differences within the Upper Norrland region, showing the coastland to be perceived as more exposed to change than inland areas. Venue-based businesses see climate change as a higher priority than activity-based, potentially mobile, businesses, regardless of their location. The general perception among businesses is that climate change will not drastically impact the tourism sector over the next 10 years. A basic model for mapping local differences is outlined to stimulate further study of the under-researched intra-regional nuances in climate change and tourism research. A case is made for regional planners to use this tool and to educate local businesses on adaptation techniques.     

An investigation into the development and progressive adaptation of graduate attributes in tourism programmes

As higher education institutes are embracing the notion of graduate attributes, it has become highly desirable to embed these attributes within programmes. This study proposes to investigate students’ views of recently identified graduate attributes in the Dublin Institute of Technology (Ireland), and how they perceive their development and application in their tourism programme. The study supports the idea of the importance of placement in the progressive adaptation of learning and in translating the conception of attributes. While students strongly believe that graduate attributes are developed through the placement experience, it is equally important to embed and strengthen the visibility of the graduate attributes building blocks throughout the programme.     

The Coorong Wilderness Lodge: A case study of planning failures in Indigenous tourism

This paper presents a case study of the Coorong Wilderness Lodge (CWL) in order to highlight barriers to success that are in part derived from poor policy and planning supports for Indigenous Australian tourism operators. This analysis assists in filling a research gap on the catalysts to economic success and failure in Indigenous tourism through obtaining rich narratives from public sector facilitators and the Indigenous Australian tourism entrepreneur. Using social construction theory, this paper narrates the story of difficulties in developing the infrastructure between 1995 and 2008. This story highlights diverging views of how such enterprises should be supported which is in part explained by cultural differences, diverging expectations and poor communications across such divides. With the founder of the CWL George Trevorrow as a co-researcher in the project, the paper provides an emic perspective that offers fresh insights into this topic.     

Convinced,ambivalent or annoyed: Tyrolean ski tourism stakeholders and their perceptions of climate change

Its focus on snow-dependent activities makes Alpine winter tourism especially sensitive to climate change. Stakeholder risk perceptions are a key factor in adaptation to climate change because they fundamentally drive or constrain stakeholder action. This paper examines climate change perceptions of winter tourism stakeholders in Tyrol (Austria). Using a qualitative approach, expert interviews were conducted. Four opinion categories reflecting different attitudes toward climate change issues were identified: convinced planners, annoyed deniers, ambivalent optimists, convinced wait-and-seers. Although the findings generally indicate a growing awareness of climate change, this awareness is mainly limited to perceiving the issue as a global phenomenon. Awareness of regional and branch-specific consequences of climate change that lead to a demand for action could not be identified. Current technical strategies, like snowmaking, are not primarily climate-induced. At present, coping with climate change is not a priority for risk management. The findings point out the importance of gaining and transferring knowledge of regional and branch-specific consequences of climate change in order to induce action at the destination level.     

Using ski industry response to climatic variability to assess climate change risk: An analogue study in Eastern Canada

To accurately characterize the ski industry's risk to future climate change and varied quality of snow conditions, it is important to assess how the industry has managed and adapted to contemporary anomalously warm ski seasons. This is the first temporal climate change analogue study to use higher resolution daily performance data at the individual ski area scale, including reported snow quality, ski lift operations, slope openings, and water usage for snowmaking. The record warm winter of 2011–2012 in the Ontario ski tourism market (Eastern Canada) is representative of projected future average winter conditions under a mid-century, high greenhouse gas emissions scenario (RCP 8.5), which was compared to the 2010–2011 season which was climatically normal (for the 1981–2010 period). Supply-side impacts across the 17 ski areas during the analogue winter included a total average decrease in the ski season length (−17% days), operating ski lifts (−3%), skiable terrain (−9%), reduced snow quality (e.g., -46% days with packed powder), snowmaking days (−18%), and an increase in water usage for snowmaking (e.g., +300% in December). Demand-side impacts include a 10% decrease in overall skier visits, with a resort size-correlation (small −20%, intermediate −14%, large −8%). With reduced operational ski terrain and more frequent marginal snow conditions, visitor experience is adversely affected more frequently. Collectively, these findings identify differential impacts in the ski tourism market and can assist ski area managers, communities, investors and governments with developing climate change adaptation plans.     

The Camping Climate Index (CCI): The development,validation, and application of a camping-sector tourism climate index

Camping is a nature-based tourism activity where individuals spend one or more night away from home in an outdoor setting. Inherent in the definition are time and space, as well as exposure to natural elements such as weather or extremes. This study introduces the novel Camping Climate Index (CCI) to explore the impacts of weather and climatic variability on camping occupancy and optimal camping conditions. Daily meteorological data for 29 for-profit camping locations is analyzed and matched with daily camping occupancy data for the tent, recreational vehicle, and cabin categories. The CCI is empirically validated for camping behaviors compared to other tourism indices including the Tourism Climate Index and Holiday Climate Index. This study is the first to create an index using observed camping occupancy data for the three categories of camping matched with daily weather data that also captures the overriding effects of extreme/adverse weather events.     

Assessing the vulnerability of beach tourism and non-beach tourism to climate change: a case study from Jamaica

The Jamaican tourism industry is very climate sensitive, and, like most Caribbean islands, Jamaica's main tourism product is coastal, centered on “sun, sea and sand”. The island is susceptible to many risks posed by climate change, including sea level rise and extreme events, with resultant impacts such as beach erosion, flooding, saline intrusion into aquifers and general coastal degradation. This paper evaluates the relative vulnerability of beach versus non-beach tourism in Jamaica, using 43 pre-determined literature-linked indicators. These comprise bio-geophysical, social, technological, economical, technological and institutional factors. Four case areas are assessed using multi-criteria decision analysis to derive vulnerability scores for each area. The study finds that non-beach tourism operations should not be automatically perceived as less vulnerable than beach-based operations. Sustainable adaptation options are complex and numerous, and overall beach tourism businesses have better insurance, emergency savings, disaster plans and backup power facilities, among others. They also have the advantage of being in business longer than the inland resorts, a firmer business structure and an extensive marketing budget. In the long term, better adaptation and planning by inland businesses could change this balance.