THE AZORES ISLANDS. HOW DO TOURISTS REACT TO CLIMATE CHANGE?
In order to analyse the reactions of tourists to the impacts of climate change and the preferences for adaptation policies, several hypothetical situations were posed to 300 tourists visiting Azores whereby possible CC impacts were outlined for the island (i.e., beach erosion, infectious diseases, forest fires, marine biodiversity loss, heat waves, etc.).
Firstly, tourists had to indicate whether they would keep their plans to stay at the island or find an alternate destination if the impact had occurred, which allows predictions of the effects on tourism arrivals to be made for each island. Secondly, tourists were asked to choose between various policy measures funded through an additional payment per day of stay – the tourists’ choices being an expression of their preferences for attributes/policies. To estimate the results, the ASC-Logit model was run by using the Stata software.
In general, data confirms that tourists are highly averse to marine wildlife disappearing to a large extent (75.30% of tourists would change destination). Moreover, they are not willing to visit the islands when there is risk of infectious diseases becoming more widespread (72.70%) or when water is scarce for leisure activities (57.70%). Consequently, policies related to beaches protection (19.1€/day), the prevention of infectious diseases (18.8€/day) and marine habitats restoration (17.4€/day) are the most valued, on average, by tourists visiting these islands.
Although climate change impacts are outside the control of tourism practitioners and policy-makers, they can nevertheless utilise this knowledge to improve the predictability of the effect that certain adaptation policies and risk management strategies, and develop their plans accordingly.