Climate change planning in a coastal tourism destination, A participatory approach

Abstract

Participatory planning is one strategy to increase tourism suppliers’ capacity to jointly anticipate climate change impacts and implement locally feasible and acceptable solutions; however, participatory planning is uncommon. In this study, we co-created a series of planning workshops with tourism partners to examine and address climate change impacts (challenges and opportunities) on Mount Desert Island, Maine, USA. We co-designed and facilitated two Zoom workshops in spring 2021 for tourism suppliers. Workshops focused on (1) identifying climate change impacts to the tourism system and (2) developing planning priorities for the destination. Workshops resulted in two planning priorities: visitation shifts and the opportunity to become a more sustainable destination in response to climate change. Our participatory approach brought together diverse tourism suppliers that do not usually collaborate to increase the destination’s capacity to plan for and respond to climate change. Similar participatory approaches may benefit other natural resource dependent contexts.

Effects and perceptions of weather, climate, and climate change on outdoor recreation and nature-based tourism in the United States: A systematic review

“…Though fewer in quantity, several papers focused on supplier perceptions of climate change to identify concerns and impacts experienced by their organizations. In Maine, tourism suppliers noted a wide range of effects of climate change to coastal tourism; some of the effects perceived to be most significant included increasing visitation, shifts in seasonality, and higher fire risk in the summer [59]. Although many suppliers are experiencing a range of weather and climate related impacts, nature-based tourism stakeholders in Maine felt they had limited control over their ability to react to most impacts, such as changes to ticks, mosquitos, biodiversity loss, and carbon dioxide emissions [60].…”

An Agent-Based Model of Hierarchical Information-Sharing Organizations in Asynchronous Environments

“…The impacts of climate change on human organizations provides one entry point for considering of the diversity of organizations that must deal with these challenges. These include natural disasters (Stute et al 2020), wildfire regimes (Yocom Kent et al 2017), seasonal park visitation (Horne et al 2022), proliferation of invasive species (Liebhold 2012), shifting production of crops (Mehrabi & Ramankutty 2019), and supply chain shocks (Baldwin & Freeman 2022). These are all quite different, but share a core of environmental change that, while not homogenous, was found to have some synchrony where external information could be useful for making local decisions.…”