City tourism pre- and post-covid-19 pandemic – Messages to take home for climate change adaptation and mitigation?

Abstract

The paper presents the status quo on climate change impacts on city tourism in Austria describing the impacts by air travel and a short stay on the greenhouse gas emissions and the changing conditions in the city. For Austrian cities, depending on location and topography, heavy rainfall events, storms and heat waves in particular could become increasingly relevant in the tourism context. For medium-sized and large cities, heat is the most frequently discussed topic in connection with possible adaptation potentials. The analysis of challenges shows a strong overlap of adaptation targets in city tourism with adaptation challenges for city planning including connection to the sub-urban surrounding areas to confront climate change impacts. Covid-19 pandemic, additionally, offered the opportunity to discuss a new re-start of the city-tourism against the experience during the shutdown period in spring 2020. The paper argues that we can learn from the current health crisis for coping with climate change related extreme events and to increase achievements in climate change mitigation. Firstly, the pandemic provides a strong ability to discuss the impact of city tourism due to short-term air travel and options to enhance more climate-friendly options on the other hand. Secondly, Covid-19 emphasized the need to reconsider the role of free spaces in metropolitan areas as well as their accessibility. Herewith synergies with climate change adaptation are likely when questioning the availability and accessibility of green and blue infrastructure as well as their capacities. Challenges including crowding and impacts by over tourism on public free spaces will require joint strategies involving all public and private institutions (including local communities and businesses) responsible for the maintenance of green and blue free spaces. Thirdly, the strong interactions between urban and suburban areas became evident once more, which will also be very relevant for city tourism in the future (e.g. in times of heat waves). Reflection on the transferability of coping with such crowding effects, related to the adaptive behaviour of residents and tourists in times of severe heat waves, might be relevant for both city tourism and summer tourism destinations near metropolitan areas. Finally, the Covid-19 crisis encourages discussions on over-tourism in metropolitan destinations in favour of a more balanced approach, in particular in inner city areas and around major sightseeing attractions.

Urban and rural tourism under COVID-19 in China: research on the recovery measures and tourism development

“…There are limited studies in the recent pandemic literature specific to urban or rural tourism. Some scholars have suggested that the suspension of tourism during COVID-19 has provided new incentives to revitalize urban tourism (Jiricka-Pürrer et al , 2020), especially in relation to adapting to climate change. Scholars also acknowledge that the impact of the normalization of the pandemic on the tourism system (Ateljevic, 2020) may have implications for regenerative agriculture and transformation tourism.…”

The Impact of a Global Crisis on Areas and Topics of Tourism Research

“…Insurance and subsidy programs for employees; support the survival of the hotel and airline industry [3,[13][14][15][16][17] Play the function of the informal sector Cooperation between the informal sector and government departments; provide microfinance; provide bank insurance [18,19] Prioritize actions Quick response to the tourism industry in crisis [13,15] Formulate public policy Prohibit or restrict the arrival of giant cruise ships and promote the development of small cruise ships; issue policies to support the aviation and hotel industry; government supervision of policy implementation [12,20,21] Table 5. Government crisis management: after the crisis.…”

“…Mindfulness; attitudes of tourists to hosts; social responsibility and civic values; understanding of sustainability; attitudes to sustainable products and destinations [13,19] On the other hand, scholars have found that in general, COVID-19 will prompt enough individuals, companies, and governments to adopt new ways of thinking, behavior, and operations that are more consistent with the sustainable development goals (like [13,32]). Therefore, they further proposed that if the tourism industry can take the expansion and stimulation of global awareness as the important value of the products and experiences it provides, then this function of the tourism industry should be strengthened (like [33,34]).…”

“…What perspective one has on sustainable tourism within Saarinen (2013)'s typology or other, will determine what one sees as solutions to problems. In our analysis of the COVID- 19 The outline of this article is as follows: the next section presents the method used in this study; Sections 3 and 4 present the main findings based on content analysis and descriptive statistical analysis methods; Section 5 comprehensively discusses these main findings, responding to "What to hope? ", "What is the challenge?…”

Is Nano-Biofortification the Right Approach for Malnutrition in the Era of COVID-19 and Climate change?

“…The novel coronavirus disease has been taking a devastating toll from all over the world. This pandemic and climate change already have been impacted on several sectors in our life such as tourism (Jiricka-Pürrer et al 2020), agriculture and food security (Rasul, 2021), air travel restrictions (Kallbekken and Saelen, 2021), public health (Pascal et al 2021), mental health (Marazziti et al 2021), energy and its management , human behavior changes (Botzen et al 2021 andNakajima et al 2021), waste respirator processing system (Zhao and You, 2021) and their different strategic management (Rahman et al 2021). Therefore, a very strong relationship between both climate change and COVID-19 pandemic, and the global food security particularly in developing states (Hickey and Unwin, 2020).…”