The Impact of Climate Change on Domestic and International Tourism: A Simulation Study

Abstract

We use an updated and extended version of the Hamburg Tourism Model to simulate the effect of development and climate change on tourism. Model extensions are the explicit modelling of domestic tourism and the inclusion of tourist expenditures. We also use the model to examine the impact of sea level rise on tourism demand. Climate change would shift patterns of tourism towards higher altitudes and latitudes. Domestic tourism may double in colder countries and fall by 20% in warmer countries (relative to the baseline without climate change). For some countries international tourism may treble whereas for others it may cut in half. International tourism is more (less) important than is domestic tourism in colder (warmer) places. Therefore, climate change may double tourist expenditures in colder countries, and halve them in warmer countries. In most places, the impact of climate change is small compared to the impact of population and economic growth. The quantitative results are sensitive to parameter choices, but the qualitative pattern is robust.

The impact of climate change on tourism in Germany, the UK and Ireland: a simulation study

“…The limitations of the HTM have been discussed in other articles using the simulation model (Hamilton et al 2005a, b;Bigano et al 2005) as well as in review articles (Bigano et al 2006;Goessling and Hall 2006a, b). These can be summarised as follows.…”

“…Version 1.0 is described by Hamilton et al (2005a), version 1.1 by Hamilton et al (2005b) and 1.2 by Bigano et al (2005). The econometrics are inspired by Maddison (2001), Lise and Tol (2002) and Hamilton (2003), while the data are as in Bigano et al (2004).…”

“…The number of international tourists to a country is the sum of international tourists from the other 206 countries. See Bigano et al (2005) for further details.…”

“…This study is a first step towards reconciling the local and global aspects of the impacts of climate change on tourism. 1 We use an econometric simulation model of domestic tourism in countries and of international tourist flows between 207 countries (Bigano et al 2005). We combine that model with the subnational data-sets of domestic and international tourism of Bigano et al (2004), 2 and we develop a downscaling method that is consistent with the assumptions in the country model.…”

Catastrophic Risk, Precautionary Abatement, and Adaptation Transfers

“…Changes in tourism flows induced by climate change are derived from simulations based on the Hamburg Tourism Model (HTM) (Bigano et al, 2007). HTM is an econometric simulation model, estimating the number of domestic and international tourists by country, the share of international tourists in total tourists and tourism flows between countries.…”