Climate change, coastal tourism, and impact chains – a literature review

Abstract

Climate change impacts tourism, since both supply and demand of tourism services depend on the quality and the management of a set of environmental attributes. This paper critically reviews the empirical evidence in the literature of the last twenty years (2000–2019), by identifying the potential impacts of climate change in coastal and maritime destinations. The concept of Impact Chains is the methodological framework through which the literature is systematically selected, classified and assessed. A great heterogeneity of results is found, with estimates of physical and socio-economic impacts of climate change differing across destinations and methodologies. Moreover, the majority of recent studies mainly deals with only a few of the most important impacts, hence future research should be re-directed to overlooked indicators and relationships, which are key for designing effective climate policies at tourism destinations.