Abstract
Since the end of the 20th century, glaciers are shrinking at an accelerated pace worldwide. This fuels the concern that increased glacier recession will lead to changes in the accessibility, safety, and amenity of many popular glacier tourist destinations—which may, in turn, affect the number of tourists visiting these areas. However, tourist responses to climate-induced environmental changes are still not well understood. Therefore, this study assesses the effects of the implications of glacier recession for glacier site visitation demand and examines the heterogeneity of tourists’ responses to these implications for visitation, combining a contingent behavior approach with multivariate cluster analysis. Data were generated from a quantitative survey of 565 visitors to Vatnajökull National Park in southeast Iceland. The results show that climate change induced environmental changes greatly affect nature-based tourism demand, and that the responses of glacier visitors to those changes vary considerably across visitation implications and visitor segments. In order to facilitate future glacier site visitation demand in a sustainable manner, decision-makers and practitioners need to act more proactively and incorporate visitor segment differences into their planning, education, communication efforts and product development.
Highlights
Climate change has been identified as global tourism’s greatest challenge with respect to sustainability [1]
The results show that climate change induced environmental changes greatly affect nature-based tourism demand, and that the responses of glacier visitors to those changes vary considerably across visitation implications and visitor segments
The significant differences in activity interest in southeast Iceland between the visitor segments have an effect on their activity participation at glacier sites in the study area
Summary
Climate change has been identified as global tourism’s greatest challenge with respect to sustainability [1]. Tourist destinations in glacial environments are vulnerable to climate change, due to their dependency on ice for their attractiveness [3,4]. Recent studies [9,10,11] show that climate change forms a serious challenge for nature-based tourism in glacial environments because it triggers glacier hazards, hampers glacier accessibility and affects the aesthetic value of the scenery. Such implications can lead to a reduction of glacier-based tour operations and in the number of visitors. Other studies argue that the prospect of vanishing glaciers constitutes an important motivation for tourists to visit glacier destinations as a form of ‘last chance tourism’ [12,13], or that even a total glacier disappearance at a destination does not automatically lead to a structural reduction in demand [14]
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