The Indirect Influence of Weather and Climate Change on Tourism Businesses in Northern Norway

Abstract

Tourism provides an important livelihood source in many areas in Northern Norway, mainly through small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). As with SMEs in other industries and areas, they depend on other businesses and networks. To analyse tourism destination development in light of the tourism industry's view of the drivers of tourism, semi-structured interviews were conducted with tourism and hospitality SME representatives in the Northern Norwegian areas of Senja and Vesterålen. The interviewees in each location noted that the main driver of tourism in their location is a single operator (one for each location). Each of those two operators states that they are highly weather-dependent. Climate change is likely to affect the weather, impacting those operations detrimentally. Thus, the industry does not perceive itself to be particularly weather-dependent, yet weather and climate change may affect it indirectly. A gap is revealed between the actual impacts of weather and climate change on the SMEs and their perceptions of the impacts. That gap could be reduced through increased collaboration of tourism authorities with the SMEs, especially regarding destination development, to help decrease the impacts of weather and climate change. As part of that, improved strategic planning would reduce the dependence of the industry in these locations on just two operators that are highly weather-sensitive.

Keywords:

• Northern Norway
• small- and medium-sized enterprises
• climate change
• tourism destinations

Acknowledgements

We thank Jens Kristian Steen Jacobsen, Grete K. Hovelsrud, Martin Lohmann, Eirik J Førland, and Hans Olav Hygen for their contributions and insights to this work, along with the interviewees who generously gave their time.

Notes

The estimates for Senja given by Haugberg (2010) include two municipalities on the mainland which account for about 16 per cent of the economic effects. That 16 per cent has been subtracted from Haugberg's (2010) numbers to yield the numbers reported here.

“Staples” are natural resources that can be extracted locally and then exported with minimal onsite processing requirements (Schmallegger & Carson, 2010).