Climate change and its potential impacts on sustainable tourism development

ABSTRACT

Being highly sensitive to the climatic condition, nature-based destinations will be faced with many changes due to climate change. Given this, it is essential to assess the impacts of projected climate change on tourism development in coastal destinations. Based on the application of the Physiologically Equivalent Temperature, this study investigates climatic information for the present and predicted conditions in the future to discuss the climate change impacts on tourism development. The results show this Iranian leading destination will become too hot in summer and a more pleasant destination in autumn and winter. Increasing investment in indoor facilities may become increasingly necessary for summer, and part of the demand should be moved from summer to the rest of the year.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• physiologically equivalent temperature
• tourism development
• Mazandaran
• Iran Tourism

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) for financially supporting this research under grant number 57403767.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst [57460688].

Notes on contributors

Mehrnaz Alizadeh

Mehrnaz Alizadeh, M.Sc in Tourism Marketing, Department of Tourism Management, University of Mazandaran. Her research interests include big data analysis, e-marketing, branding, consumer behaviour, and environmental change.

Roozbeh Mirzaei

Roozbeh Mirzaei is an assistant professor at the tourism department at the University of Mazandaran, Iran, and a visiting researcher at the University of Giessen, Germany. He has more than ten years of experience as a consultant in tourism planning. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Giessen, and his research interests include big data analysis, smart destination, consumer behaviour, Geotourism development, and tourism impacts.

Andreas Dittmann

Andreas Dittmann studied Geography, Geology, Anthropology, Religion and African Languages at the universities of Marburg and Frankfurt (Diploma in Physical Geography, Ph.D. in Anthropology and habilitation in Human Geography). Fields of current research are MENA region and Subsaharan Africa. Related topics: Cultural Geography, Political Geography, Environmental Peacebuilding, Transborder Geopark Management). He is the president of the Association of Geographers at Universities in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland (VGD); vice-president of German Geographical Societies (GeoGes) and president of the German-Afghan University Society (DAUG).