Predicting tourism flows under climate change

Climatic Change, 2006

2012

The current pattern of international tourist flows evidences how climate is one of the main factors in the destination choice of tourists. Climate scientists are very certain that the Earth's climate will change at an unprecedented rate over the 21st century, anticipating global warming. This paper investigates the role of climate and other determining variables in destination choice for international tourist flows. A model for international tourist arrivals is estimated by using bilateral tourism movements between 178 countries from 1995 to 2010, allowing the estimation of a time-varying climatic sensitivity of tourists. Using data for the projected growth of Gross Domestic Product per capita and climatic conditions within the A2, B1 and B2 scenarios, the expected impact on international tourism flows is assessed, showing and evaluating how climate change would imply a loss of attractiveness for traditional warmer destinations around the world but would increase attractiveness for high latitude countries.

DOI: 10.1007/s10584-006-9081-y

Journal of Travel Research, 2007

2006

We use an updated and extended version of the Hamburg Tourism Model to simulate the effect of development and climate change on tourism. Models extensions are the explicit modelling of domestic tourism, and the inclusion of tourist expenditures. Climate change would shift patterns of tourism towards higher altitudes and latitudes. Domestic tourism may double in colder countries and fall by 20% in warmer countries (relative to the baseline without climate change). For some countries international tourism may treble whereas for others it may cut in half. International tourism is more (less) important than is domestic tourism in colder (warmer) places. Therefore, climate change may double tourist expenditures in colder countries, and halve them in warmer countries. In most places, the impact of climate change is small compared to the impact of population and economic growth.The quantitative results are sensitive to parameter choices, both for the baseline and the impact of climate change. The qualitative pattern is robust, however. Climate change is more important to tourism than is sea level rise, because the latter heavily affects only a few places where beach nourishment is a viable option.

2013

In a context of climate change, many destinations are considering what effects can be predicted on the tourist demand and how they should be tackled. This work analyses the most relevant perspectives presented in the literature evaluating the effect of climate change on tourism. A review is made by showing the results that rise from a triple point of view: the consideration of physical changes, the analysis of the tourist attractiveness through climatic indexes and modeling tourism demand. The review suggests that, although some methodologies are on a primary stage of development, results from the different perspectives agree in presenting a similar map of the main affected areas (positively and negatively) in terms of tourism demand and/or tourism attractiveness.

2011

Tourism economies depend on tourism for promoting economic growth. Tourism is obviously highly sensitive to climate. Therefore, with mounting evidence of climate change, an important question is: what is the impact of climate change on tourism economies? To answer this question, we use a model in Ng and Zhao (2010) to estimate the economic impacts of climate change on different types of economies. Our main finding is that climate change's impact on tourism economies is not smaller than its impact on other types of economies if temperature increases by more than 1 degree Celsius. Therefore, our findings suggest that tourism economies should also implement aggressive climate mitigation policy.

… Climate Change-An Interdisciplinary …, 2004

Tourism is one of the largest and fastest growing economic sectors. Tourism is obviously related to climate, as tourists prefer spending time outdoors and travel to enjoy the sun or landscape. It is therefore surprising that the tourism literature pays little attention to climate and climatic change and it is equally surprising that the climate change impact literature pays little attention to tourism. The number of studies on tourism and climate change is, however, starting to grow. This paper reviews this literature, discussing shortcomings and recent developments in global modeling of tourism flows are presented. The range of methods used and issues studied in the literature is large, and findings are correspondingly diverse.

Global environmental change, 2005

The literature on tourism and climate change lacks an analysis of the global changes in tourism demand. Here a simulation model of international tourism is presented that fills that gap. The current pattern of international tourist flows is modelled using 1995 data on departures and arrivals for 207 countries. Using this basic model the impact on arrivals and departures through changes in population, per capita income and climate change are analysed.