Effects of climate change on international tourism

Abstract

We present a simulation model of the flow of tourists between 207 countries, used to study the impact of climate change on international tourism. The model almost perfectly reproduces the calibration year 1995, and performs well in reproducing the observations for 1980, 1985 and 1990. The model is used to generate scenarios of international tourist departures and arrivals for the period 2000-2075, with particular emphasis on climate change; we report variations on a single baseline scenario (A1B). The growth rate of international tourism is projected to increase over the coming decades, but may slow down later in the century, as demand for travel saturates. Emissions of carbon dioxide would increase quickly as well. With climate change, preferred destinations would shift to higher latitudes and altitudes. Tourists from temperate climates would spend more holidays in their home countries. As such tourists currently dominate the international tourism market, climate change would decrease worldwide tourism. Nevertheless, its effects are small compared to the baseline projections of population and economic growth. KEY WORDS: International tourism · Climate change impacts · CO 2 emissions · ScenariosResale or republication not permitted without written consent of the publisher

A General Equilibrium Analysis of Climate Change Impacts on Tourism

“…We take our estimates of changes in international tourist flows from Hamilton et al (2004). Theirs is an econometrically estimated simulation model of bilateral flows of tourists between 207 countries; the econometrics is reported in Maddison (2001), Lise and Tol (2002) and Hamilton (2003).…”

“…However, since a region typically comprises more than one nation, tourists moving from one country to another within the same region are accounted for as domestic tourists. 5 We would expect intra-regional impacts to be particularly strong in Europe, given the tourist flows projections in Hamilton et al (2004). Finer disaggregations, which would solve this problem, are left for future research.…”

“…Moreover, we assumed that the rest of the explanatory variables in equation (2) of Hamilton et al (2004) do not change with time or are not relevant for the basis of domestic tourists. Also, we did not impose any upper limit to the number of occasions in which an individual can behave as a tourist in any given year 8 .…”

“…Equation (2) of Hamilton et al (2004) boils down to: Table 2. Domestic tourism in the base year and projections for simulation years, in terms of ratio of tourists to population (left) and total number of tourists (thousands, right).…”

“…In fact, few of these studies look at all at economic aspects, the main exception being Maddison (2001), Lise and Tol (2002) and Hamilton (2003) who estimates the changes in demand of British, Dutch and German tourists, respectively. Hamilton et al (2004) do look at supply and demand for all countries, but their model is restricted to tourist numbers. This paper tries to fill this gap in the literature.…”