Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation in the Tourism Sector

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Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation in the Tourism Sector Frameworks, Tools and Practices
From the perspective of institutions such as the UN Commission on Sustainable
Development, capacity-development encompasses a wide range of aspects,
including human, technological, organisational, fi nancial, scientifi c, cultural and
institutional dimensions. Capacity building was recognised as one of the means
of implementing Agenda 21 and is also a key means of implementation in the
Johannesburg Plan of Implementation (JPOI) (UN-DESA n.d.). The JPOI called
for enhancing and accelerating human, institutional and infrastructure capacity
building initiatives and assisting developing countries in building capacity to
access a larger share of multilateral and global research and development
programmes. Primarily, capacity building is the process and means through
which governments and communities develop the necessary skills and expertise
to manage their environment and natural resources in a sustainable manner within
their daily activities.
One of the essential elements of capacity building is the development of
knowledge: the capacity to enhance skills, utilise research and development
and foster learning; and the provision of supporting information: the capacity to
collect, access and utilise quality information. In order to do this effectively it is
important to provide an assessment of identifi able gaps in our knowledge base
with respect to tourism and climate change.
Despite the signifi cant growth in research on tourism and climate change there are
considerable gaps in the previously published research regarding the knowledge of
climate change adaptation and mitigation, particularly in the context of developing
countries and small island states. For example, the widely cited 2006 review on
the economics of climate change commissioned by the UK government from Sir
Nicholas Stern (Stern 2006) made 19 references to tourism, tourist and recreation
and cognate terms in the review with most of these being brief mentions and
in the context of developed rather than developing countries and small island
states (Hall 2008). More research and analysis of this critical global sector is
clearly required. In contrast, tourism is given greater emphasis in the IPCC climate
change reports although, both here and with respect to the UNWTO-UNEP-WMO
(2008) report there is evidence of far greater knowledge of tourism and climate
change with respect to adaptation and mitigation in the developed world than in
the less developed countries and island states.
Tourism has become increasingly recognised in the reports of the IPCC Working
Group on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability (UNWTO-UNEP-WMO 2008; Hall
2008). Table 2 compares reference to tourism, tourist, recreation and cognate
terms in comparable chapters of the 2001 (IPCC 2001) and 2007 (IPCC. 2007b)
reports of the Working Group (Hall 2008). It is noticeable that although there are
22 Key Knowledge Gaps Related to Developing Countries and Small Island States