Modelling tourists' responses to climate change and its effects on alpine ski tourism – A comparative approach for European Regions

Abstract

The paper presents a Regional Distribution Model (RDM), simulating the distribution of alpine skiing tourists in Europe, based on climate change impacts. For 71 European NUTS 3 winter tourism regions possible substitution effects on basis of climate change linked snow reliability and of two behavioural adaptation strategies that result in three different scenarios on touristic market connectedness are investigated. Results for 2050 are presented for European countries and on NUTS 3 level. Without adaptation strategies essential losses in overnight stays in all regions have to be expected (Scenario 1). Allowing shifts to more snow reliable areas (Scenario 2), these losses are significantly reduced, some countries and winter tourism regions profit from climate change by showing small increases. If skiers are allowed to shift also to other tourist activities outside NUTS 3 winter tourism regions within Europe (Scenario 3), all countries and winter tourism regions show again losses in overnight stays, which are usually lower than those for Scenario 1. The paper gives detailed information on Climate Change related competitiveness of touristic NUTS III regions. It argues that multi-regional modelling of tourism activities that take the connectedness of tourism markets into account, are an important part of climate change impact modelling for the tourism sector. We predict, that due to COVID-19 travel restrictions that may be a phenomenon that will occur more often in future, these kind of tourism models that explicitly model, the tourists of which region originate from which other region, will be used more often, since the connectedness of markets might no longer be a static variable.