Today I read two papers on climate change and tourism. Why? because I was thinking about creating a small model which can present the possible impacts of climate change on tourism on a limited sample community. I was thinking about a very small village, imagine 200 people whose livelihood is highly related on tourism at their area. Let’s say, on average, they have 10 tourists every day which go there to enjoy an attraction there which is vulnerable to climate change. It can be a skiing resort or a beach. Then, we can say tourists on average spend 50 dollars there. So, the sustainability of this area is highly related to constant tourists’ arrival.

Now, we can make a model and talk about the possible impacts of climate change on the area. I am more interested in thresholds. For example, we may say that if the number of tourists decrease due to climate change, then the only problem will be less income for the locals. But imagine that this village has two doctors that one of them leaves when the number of tourism drops. This will affect the health access in the area. Then the government may allocate less budget to their police department or a one of their hotels may stop servicing which will increase unemployment in our village. So, we might say that our predictions show that the threshold for this village to become totally vacant is having on average 2 tourists per day while this can happen even when they have five tourists.

I read “climate change as a threat to tourism in Alps” which predicts that climate change will jeopardize snow-reliable skiing sites in Switzerland by around 50% of their area. It is a good sample of the impacts of climate change on rich countries.
Let me tell something here. I think one of the problems with climate change awareness process is that associated organizations always expect us to sigh for poor countries like Maldives or Bangladesh. I know and you know that they are going to face with catastrophic problems but if we want to make someone in Europe or Australia concerned about climate change, we should talk about their own challenges as well. We should let Australians know that climate change can increase food price in their country, cause unemployment, limit their travels and so on. We should not present climate change as a opportunity for poor countries to request money from rich ones.

I was reading another paper titled “Implications of Global Climate Change for Tourism Flows and Seasonality”. It had a nice concept. The authors mention that climate change has been considered as a stable factor in tourism analyses for a long time although weather is an important factor when people make their decision for travelling. They have a long discussion and conclusion section in their paper which I copy its first paragraph here:

The potential changes in tourism comfort levels suggested by combination of the Tourism Climatic Index with scenarios of climate change have profound implications for the global tourism industry. Whereas some locations are likely to experience substantial increases in attractiveness due to improvements in their weather conditions, others may become significantly less appealing to tourists, leading to shifts in the temporal patterns of visitation and/or actual declines in the number of visits.