The last resort? Ski tourism and climate change in Arctic Sweden

Abstract

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to discuss the external and internal factors that support or challenge a possible transformation of Arctic Sweden into a major ski destination under a changing climate. Design/methodology/approach -The paper questions future availability of the physical and the human factors that foster ski tourism development in Arctic Sweden and suggests a comparative case study in relation to the already existing large resort-based ski destinations in Arctic Finland.Findings -Preliminary documentary analysis shows that the governmental and the industrial discourses over the past decade have acknowledged a competitive edge for Sweden and its northernmost regions in particular and may even propose a structural shift for ski tourism in the near future agenda. The visualisations based on natural snow projections presented in this paper confirm this comparative advantage but other technical and socioeconomic development factors are further discussed, in relation to Arctic Finland. Research limitations/implications -Future research agenda is suggested to cover, first, assessment of natural and technical snow reliability of existing and all potential ski areas in Sweden and within its competitive set extending to all the Nordics and the Alps, then, incorporation of adaptive capacities of the suppliers but especially the likely substitution tendencies of the consumers, and finally, evaluation of the overall situation in terms of the regional development needs. Social implications -It is apparent that land use conflicts will arise in case of large ski resort-based destination development in Arctic Sweden, especially around the environmentally protected areas, which are not only already important attractions for nature-based tourism but also traditional livelihoods for the Sami. Originality/value -This is the first paper to discuss a potential regional and structural shift of ski tourism in Sweden.

Geobibliography and Bibliometric Networks of Polar Tourism and Climate Change Research

“…The 84 keywords that were used at least three times in the 93 articles agglomerate into six clusters according to their distances to each other (Figure 3a), yielding 1259 links. The largest cluster with 20 items (red) stems from a wider theme on climate change adaptation of Arctic tourism from all the policy [53,56], community [53,56,71,76,77], business [33,39,53,56,80,101,106], and visitor [38,56] perspectives. Cluster 2 (n: 16, green) covers mostly combined impacts of climate change and polar tourism, with a spatial focus on the Antarctic [41,92,96,109].…”

“…Firstly, a transition into "climate change" from "global warming" is observed, in line with the general trends. The pioneering research from Canada [44,51,54,59,81,[103][104][105], on the other hand, has relatively aged, while other hot topics such as European Arctic tourism [50,57,66], especially activity-specific tourism types like ski tourism [21,33,56,106], emerge.…”

“…A significant cluster (dark green, n: 21) is formed among mostly Canada affiliated researchers, some of whom [19,20,26,27,30,31,[34][35][36][51][52][53][54]67,74,75,86,[103][104][105] bear the highest total link strengths based on the number of articles they have contributed to. Some other researchers such as de la Barre [20], Lamers [20,82], Scott [33,54], and Müller [20,56] play key roles in linking this cluster with European counterparts. The Supplementary Materials can be used to highlight each node's (author or keyword) individual links with the others.…”

“…This might be due to the multi-scenario approach of these studies, where tourism is only one component analyzed without much reference to climate change. That being said, many of the newer co-authors [39,41,47,48,79,90,101,102] also seem isolated from the main sets, while some others [33,41,56,67,79] have formed their connections with the well-linked pioneers.…”

“…The studies are also classified according to the tourism type examined-again, studies on different tourism types were repeatedly pinned with respective icons. From a macroregional perspective, 73 of the 93 studies focus on the Arctic [19,[21][22][23][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][43][44][45][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59][62][63][64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71][72][73][74][76][77]…”