Tourism

Tourism ranks amongst those sectors regarded as being highly weather and climate sensitive, since lots of tourism types and activities have a strong link to the environment and to the climate itself. During snow-poor winters, such as 1989/90 and 2006/07, several Austrian regions showed noticeable drops in tourism demand—whereas extraordinary sunny, warm and dry summers, like the one in 2003, coincided with above-average tourism demand increases in lake regions. In order to assess the potential impacts of future climate change on tourism demand in Austria, we (1) use dynamic multiple regression models to quantify the sensitivity of overnight stays towards year-to-year weather for each NUTS 3 region and various seasons, (2) apply the resulting sensitivities on climate change scenarios—based on a general tourism development scenario—and (3) transform the resulting impacts on overnight stays into monetary terms using average tourist expenditures. Outcomes suggest predominantly negative impacts on winter tourism and mainly positive impacts on summer tourism, with the net impact being negative. Finally we (4) evaluate the effects of the negative tourism impacts in a macroeconomic CGE model. Resulting spillover effects to other economic sectors as well as changes in GDP and welfare are found to be even higher than the impacts on tourism. There are considerable uncertainties however, not only with respect to climate change scenarios, but also for instance regarding future tourist preferences and weather/climate sensitivities.