Costs and benefits of environmental change: tourism industry's responses in Arctic Finland

ABSTRACT

Recent research has focused on the impacts of environmental change to tourism. In particular, the perceived costs of climate change have been increasingly studied. However, the relationship between costs and benefits resulting from the changing environmental conditions for the industry has been less examined. This paper identifies the locally observed changes in the natural and socio-economic environments and aims to analyse the financial costs and benefits to tourism businesses in two tourism-dependent communities in northern Finland. The specific focus is on adaptation and adaptive management in a tourist destination scale. Adaption is understood as an investment creating not only implementation costs, but potentially also benefits for tourism operations. Research materials were collected among tourism and tourism-related businesses through 41 semi-structured thematic interviews. Results indicate that the evaluated benefits of environmental change seem to exceed those of costs. This conforms to the on-going discourse of climate change–tourism relations associated with the Arctic region where both awareness and vulnerability to change are considered relatively high but the level of responses, i.e. adaptation, low. These results can help to further identify the most vulnerable sectors in tourism and assist entrepreneurs preparing for environmental and climate change. However, the paper concludes that while global environmental change, with specific adaptive management strategies, may create local short-term direct benefits for the industry, a long-term sustainability of tourism in the Arctic calls for mitigation responses to climate change.

摘要

近期旅游研究关注环境变化对旅游业的冲击, 尤其日益关注对气候变化代价的感知, 但是对于环境变化引起的旅游业代价与收益之间的关系却鲜有探讨。本文研究了芬兰北部当地居民观察到的自然与社会经济环境的变化, 并且分析了环境变化给当地两个旅游社区的旅游企业带来的经济代价与收益。本文特别关注目的地尺度旅游业对环境变化的适应及相关的适应性管理。适应可以理解为一种投资, 不仅产生实施的代价, 也会产生潜在的旅游运营收益。本文通过对41位旅游及相关企业进行半结构的主题访谈收集研究资料。结果表明, 旅游企业评估的环境变化给旅游业带来的收益似乎超过了因之产生的代价。这符合极地地区气候变化与旅游关系持续讨论的结果, 那里不管对气候变化的认识还是对气候变化的敏感性水平都比较高, 但是相关的响应水平 (比如适应) 低。该研究结果有助于旅游业进一步识别出最脆弱的部门, 有助于企业家应对环境与气候变化。然而, 本文得出结论, 尽管全球环境变化由于当地特定的适应管理策略短期内给旅游业带来了收益, 但是该地区旅游业若实现长期的持续发展需要响应对策缓解气候变化的冲击。

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental change
• climate change
• adaptation
• adaptive management
• costs and benefits
• Lapland
• Arctic
• tourism
• community
• SMEs

关键词:

• 环境变化
• 气候变化
• 适应
• 适应性管理
• 代价与收益
• 拉普兰德
• 旅游业
• 社区
• 中小企业

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

Academy of Finland [FICCA: The CLICHE-project (Impacts of Climate Change on Arctic Environment, Ecosystem Services and Society)].

Notes on contributors

Kaarina Tervo-Kankare

Kaarina Tervo-Kankare is a postdoctoral researcher in the Geography Research Unit at the University of Oulu, Finland. Her current research focuses on human/tourism-environment relations, sustainability, nature-based tourism, global environmental change and rural and wellbeing tourism.

Eva Kaján

Eva Kaján is a postdoctoral researcher at the Geography Research Unit of University of Oulu. Her research focuses on sustainability issues, local level tourism development and the Arctic region.

Jarkko Saarinen

Jarkko Saarinen is a professor of geography at the University of Oulu, Finland, and a distinguished visiting professor at the School of Tourism and Hospitality, University of Johannesburg, South Africa. His research interests include tourism and development, sustainability management, tourism-community relations, tourism and climate change and conservation and wilderness studies.