Climate change and tourism adaptation: literature review

Abstract

Purpose – This paper reviews published English literature on tourism adaptation to climate change. Climate change remains a challenge in the 21st centaury and beyond. Climate sensitive industries like tourism are vulnerable to climate change. It is for this reason that tourism researchers have continued to explore the relationship between tourism and climate change and further explored response strategies among tourism stakeholders. Tourism research on climate change adaptation may be traces way back in the 1960s. However, focused research on climate change and tourism has emerged in the last 15 years. Design – This review maps tourism adaptation knowledge domains between early 1960s and 2014. Methodology – This paper rely on secondary English published tourism literature to aid the review Findings – Findings indicate that tourism adaptation literature have advanced under five thematic areas prior 2010 to include: Business adaptation; Consumer adaptation, Destination Adaptation; adaptation Policy and; Frameworks for adaptation. However, after 2010 a new theme on ‘sustainable adaptation’ is tourism has emerged and it is gaining attention among tourism researchers Originality – The originality of this paper is that the paper is the first paper in tourism that has identified sustainable adaptation as a new emerging thematic area in tourism and climate change adaptation research. The paper notes an emergence of interest on sustainable adaptation knowledge domain despite lack of clarity on what is sustainable adaptation within tourism research. It is therefore important for researchers to amicably define the term sustainable adaptation to enable comparative studies and discourse in the area.