Abstract
Climate change has brought people’s attention in recent decades, which demonstrates a critical phenomenon of increased natural disaster risks. The consequences of natural hazards are highly potential to bring significant economic, reputational, social, and environmental impacts on Australia’s tourism industry. Considering the close relationship between the unique natural environment and the local tourism industry, natural disasters always play critical roles in terms of the destinations’ resilience. This paper aims to examine the cause-and-effect of natural disaster resilience for the tourism industry in Eastern Australia with the particular concern of bushfire. Representative bushfire events will be studied to locate the industry’s preparedness and the existed action gaps mainly with the focus on government and destination management organizations, as well as discuss the disaster prevention implications, direct/indirect impacts and tourism-related issues. Also, a natural disaster resilience assessment framework for the industry will be developed with the key indicators from multiple aspects. A couple of future directions will be proposed regarding recovery methods, including the needs of destination image recovery, supportive policies for small businesses and cross-functional partnership.
Highlights
It is recognised that climate change has triggered an increasing phenomenon in the frequency and severity of extreme weathers such as heatwave/drought, bushfire and cyclone/floods (RossellóR, Becken, & Santana-Gallego, 2020)
The impacts of natural disasters on social development and human activities have led to calls for improving disaster resilience, meaning households, communities, and businesses’ capacity to cope with and adapt to natural hazards’ shocks and stresses (Ruane, 2020)
Among the multiple natural disasters happen around Eastern Australia, it is evident that bushfire always causes the most significant loss of natural capital and tend to have long-term impacts on the ecosystem and nearby societies
Summary
It is recognised that climate change has triggered an increasing phenomenon in the frequency and severity of extreme weathers such as heatwave/drought, bushfire and cyclone/floods (RossellóR, Becken, & Santana-Gallego, 2020). The impacts of natural disasters on social development and human activities have led to calls for improving disaster resilience, meaning households, communities, and businesses’ capacity to cope with and adapt to natural hazards’ shocks and stresses (Ruane, 2020). Among the multiple natural disasters happen around Eastern Australia, it is evident that bushfire always causes the most significant loss of natural capital and tend to have long-term impacts on the ecosystem and nearby societies. To enhance regional tourism resilience and improve destinations’ restoration capabilities regarding the consequences of natural hazards, both the government and community are expected to better understand the major natural disasters regarding the characteristics and impacts (Pyke, De Lacy, Law, & Jiang, 2016). The unique landscapes attract a considerable number of visitors, but the natural disasters caused by severe climate event is an unavoidable challenge for the development of the tourism industry. According to the Australian Natural Disaster Resilience Index, disaster resilience can be defined as communities’ capability to prepare for, absorb and recover from natural hazard events and the capacity to learn, adapt, and transform towards resilience
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