Future climate resources for tourism in Europe based on the daily Tourism Climatic Index

Abstract

Climate is an important resource for many types of tourism. One of several metrics for the suitability of climate for sightseeing is Mieczkowski's "Tourism Climatic Index" (TCI), which summarizes and combines seven climate variables. By means of the TCI, we analyse the present climate resources for tourism in Europe and projected changes under future climate change. We use daily data from five regional climate models and compare the reference period to the A2 scenario in 2071-2100. A comparison of the TCI based on reanalysis data and model simulations for the reference period shows that current regional climate models capture the important climatic patterns. Currently, climate resources are best in Southern Europe and deteriorate with increasing latitude and altitude. With climate change the latitudinal band of favourable climate is projected to shift northward improving climate resources in Northern and Central Europe in most seasons. Southern Europe's suitability for sightseeing tourism drops strikingly in the summer holiday months but is partially compensated by considerable improvements between October and April.

Comparison of Climate Preferences for Domestic and International Beach Holidays: A Case Study of Canadian Travelers

“…A direct impact of climate change on tourism will be the global redistribution of climatic resources, which will affect the temporal and spatial distribution of domestic and international tourism flows and economic spending [94]. An increasing number of publications have sought to analyze how travel flows could be altered by climate change [57,60,61,63,64,[95][96][97][98][99][100][101]. The results from these publications are meant to identify potentially vulnerable destinations and assist the tourism industry in planning future operations, including the development of adaptation strategies to minimize associated risks and capitalize on new opportunities posed by changes in the competitive relationships among destinations [98].…”

Socio-economic Impacts—Recreation

“…The scientific literature contains many references to tourists, their preferences and their behaviour, including changes in tourist flows and seasonality (Braun et al 1999;Maddison 2001;Lise and Tol 2002;Wietze and Tol 2002;Lohmann 2003;Hamilton et al 2005;Gössling and Hall 2006;Bigano et al 2006bBigano et al , 2008Hamilton and Tol 2007;Moreno and Amelung 2009;Buzinde et al 2010;Hall 2010;Perch-Nielsen et al 2010;Denstadli et al 2011;Rosselló-Nadal et al 2011;Gössling et al 2012). One of the major questions these studies raise is whether mass tourism of the type seen today at the Mediterranean Sea coast will shift to destinations in northern Europe, such as the North Sea region.…”

Climate change, uncertainty, and consequent risks: opportunities for forest management adaptation in britain

“…The only missing climate variable was minimum daily relative humidity, which we replaced with the mean daily relative humidity as described in (Perch-Nielsen et al 2010). All climate variables were available for the baseline period (1961 -1990) except for wind data, which were only available for 1971-2000 but still provide a good proxy for the baseline.…”

“…All climate variables were available for the baseline period (1961 -1990) except for wind data, which were only available for 1971-2000 but still provide a good proxy for the baseline. To calculate changes in tourism potential between the baseline and the future, we used the number of "good days" with TCI >= 60 indicating suitable conditions for light tourism; a similar proxy was used by Perch-Nielsen et al (2010). The highest visitor numbers in Scottish forests are in summer, hence we analysed changes in average number of good days in summer months (June, July, and August).…”

“…Using the same index but different climate datasets, other studies reported a northward shift of "good" days to southern Scotland in the 2060s or 2080s (Hein et al 2009;PerchNielsen et al 2010), and an increase in the frequency of good days by about 5 days (Perch-Nielsen et al 2010). Overall, we found that due to drought impacts forests in the lowlands show a smaller absolute reduction in ecosystem services than in the uplands, but the relative decrease in the provision of ecosystem services is larger in the lowlands, hence the uplands seem to be more resilient to drought.…”