The use of climate services in tourism – strengthening climate resilience

In tourism, both the suppliers and the consumers of tourist services are sensitive to weather and climate conditions. A challenge for tourist service suppliers is their twofold sensitivity: they should not only assess how climate change and climate variability may affect their costs, but also how consumers may perceive climate change effects on various tourist services and supporting amenities, and how they would respond to these perceived or experienced effects.
While some climate driven tourism indexes have been developed, consumer behavior in the field depends also on many other factors of which development can be hard to predict. Yet, the crucial importance of climate to many types of tourism like winter sports or beach holidays means that the sector can find high value in relevant and applicable climate services (CS), both so-called seasonal CS and long term CS for better coping with climate change.

Proactive design of climate services concepts

In EU-MACS, key market barriers and enablers for climate services in tourism have been identified in close collaboration with stakeholders from the industry, local authorities and other experts. We’ve elaborated the requirements on climate services for the different types of end-users in the tourism sector (individual tourism businesses, tourism associations, travel agencies, public administration etc.) in workshops, interviews and surveys conducted mainly in Austria and Finland. Based on these experiences from the interactive and iterative stakeholder process we have made recommendations for climate service providers, users and policy makers.

Outcomes and outputs

EU-MACS project has produced several written reports and online resources for anyone interested in climate services for tourism sector. Perhaps the best starting points are the FAQ and policy brief. The report on the results of explorations of climate services market development in tourism sector provides more detailed analysis. More information on climate services in tourism are also available within the reports of the MARCO project.

Outputs