Tourism Demand Report

Tourism is one of the largest and fastest growing economic sectors. Tourism is obviously related to climate. It is therefore surprising that the tourism literature pays little attention to climate and climatic change (e.g., Witt and Witt, 1995). It is equally surprising that the climate change impact literature pays little attention to tourism (Smith et al., 2001).

The situation is now slowly changing. Three branches of literature have started to grow. Firstly, there are a few studies (e.g., Maddison, 2001) that build statistical models of the behaviour of certain groups of tourists as a function of weather and climate. Secondly, there are a few studies (e.g., Abegg, 1996) that relate the fates of particular tourist destinations to climate. Thirdly, there are studies (e.g., Matzarakis, 2002) that try to define indicators of the attractiveness to tourists of certain weather conditions. These three strands in the literature share a common deficit, namely the lack of a larger, global assessment of push and pull factors of international tourism. This study is an attempt to fill that gap.

If one wants to estimate the implications of climate change for a particular tourist destination, then one would not only want to know how the attractiveness of that place is changing—as is done in the second strand of literature defined above. Rather, one would need to know how climate change affects the attractiveness of that place relative to its competitors. If, for instance, Switzerland loses half of its snow, but other European skiing destinations lose all—then Switzerland's position may well be strengthened as the only place in Europe with natural snow. Similarly, one would need the change in behaviour of all tourists, and not just of those from Germany, the Netherlands and the UK—as the first strand of literature does. This paper combines the first and second strands of literature to overcome these drawbacks. Like the third strand of literature, it uses attractiveness...