Tourism Resilience and Adaptation to Environmental Change

Definitions and Frameworks

Alan A. Lew, Joseph M. Cheer, Alan A. Lew, Joseph M. Cheer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138206793
• eBook ISBN: 9781315463957
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

In recent years, resilience theory has come to occupy the core of our understanding and management of the adaptive capacity of people and places in complex social and environmental systems. Despite this, tourism scholars have been slow to adopt resilience concepts, at a time when the emergence of new frameworks and applications is pressing.

Drawing on original empirical and theoretical insights in resilience thinking, this book explores how tourism communities and economies respond to environmental changes, both fast (natural hazard disasters) and slow (incremental shifts). It explores how tourism places adapt, change, and sometimes transform (or not) in relation to their environmental context, with an awareness of intersection with societal dynamics and links to political, economic and social drivers of change. Contributions draw on empirical research conducted in a range of international settings, including indigenous communities, to explore the complexity and gradations of environmental change encounters and resilience planning responses in a range of tourism contexts.

As the first book to specifically focus on environmental change from a resilience perspective, this timely and original work makes a critical contribution to tourism studies, tourism management and environmental geography, as well as environmental sciences and development studies.

Part I
Introduction

1 Environmental change, resilience and tourism

Definitions and frameworks

Alan A. Lew Joseph M. Cheer

Resilience and environmental change

The repercussions of global warming and changeable weather patterns such as El Niño on many of the world's coral reefs, as exemplified by Australia's Great Barrier Reef, demonstrate significant local-level effects of environmental change that are potentially severe for tourism communities (Norström et al., 2016). Indeed, natural hazard disasters are often ‘glocalized’, rather than limited to only one particular locality, as demonstrated in incidences of tsunamis, volcanic eruptions and hurricanes (Uitto, 2016). This renders local adaptive responses inescapably interdependent within global action contexts, with the success or failure of either linked to some degree.

That said, while environmental crises can be catastrophic in their outcomes, they can also present opportunities for change and innovation where feedback loops signal directional potentials, possibly resulting in more effective cooperation and better outcomes, and mitigating the ‘tragedy of the commons’ (Lindahl, Crépin & Schill, 2016). In a sense, this is illustrative of the aims of resilience where the new state condition can at times lead to far more resilient conditions. One of the benefits of a crisis, so long as the change does not lead to permanent destruction, is that tipping points may become obvious, enabling a clearer understanding of the causal mechanisms that generated the crisis situation (SRC, 2015). In identifying such tipping points, communities can ‘self organise and respond’ (Arctic Council, 2016), as well as spur innovation in a kind of creative–destruction manner (Schumpeter, 1943; Holling, 2001).

Adaptive responses that leverage knowledge, experience and innovation are underpinned by policy learning and paradigm changes (Lew, 2014). However, the development of optimal adaptive capacities rests on ‘ensuring that a system is able to accept change and unpredictability, and is designed to be safe to fail, as well as being able to respond to the needs of the most vulnerable’ (Hall, 2018, p.28).

Tourism and the natural environment

The experience of natural environments has probably always been a motivation for leisure, recreation, education and other forms of touristic travel (Meyer-Arendt, 2004; Williams & Lew, 2014; Hill, Curtain & Go, 2014). In response, tourism industries have become prominent in places that have the kinds of natural resources that people associate with their travel and tourism needs. Mountains, beaches, islands, and tropical climates are among the many natural features that tourists, and therefore tourism industries, are drawn to, especially when they are all found in the same place. Tourism economies in such places are largely dependent on their natural endowments and are vulnerable to any threats that might damage those resources.

Every tourism place, whether its attractions are nature-based or cultural, are defined by their location in terms that geographers refer to as site and situation (Lew, Hall & Timothy, 2015). Site characteristics are all the natural environmental features that are inherent and intrinsic to the place's location. This includes the topography of the land and water, as well as types of vegetation and soil, and climate and weather patterns. These offer opportunities for human settlement and development, which includes tourism development where such features meet the touristic interests of visitors. As these are developed, they become new topographic features added to the site characteristics of a place. (Thus, a topographic map not only shows ground elevation, but also vegetation, roads and built-up settlement areas.)

Human settlements tend to be created with an assumption that the site characteristics at the time of their development will remain largely unchanged into the future. In some instances, such as in floodplains, we know through experience that this is not true and we therefore use regulation and engineering to adapt land uses and to manage the potential changes that we can foresee. Unfortunately, it is not always possible to foresee all of the potential changes that nature can bring our way, and, even when potential nature-related hazards are known, there are often insufficient funds to address a community's vulnerabilities.

While some environmental change may be primarily associated with a site's characteristics (such as a landslide or the overuse of groundwater), most environmental changes are much broader in scope and origin. This points to the situation characteristics of a place, which is defined as the relationships that a place has with other places, as well as with its larger spatial context beyond its immediate site location. Climate change, for example, is driven more by regional and global processes than by local site changes. (Although there also are some local impacts from urban heat islands and air pollution caused by fossil fuel emissions and seasonal air temperature inversions.) Flooding, as mentioned above, is often caused by weather phenomena that are much broader than the individual site that experiences the flooding. However, how that site is naturally endowed and how humans have changed the site can determine whether the flood's impact reaches disaster proportions.

In their relationship to their environmental site and situation, tourism places are not separate from non-tourism places. They both share similar challenges (and opportunities) from changing environmental conditions. All places experience environmental changes that sometimes occur fast and unexpected, and at other times are slow and almost imperceptible (Lew, 2014). These changes have the potential to impact all residents and all economic sectors in a place. Some types of environmental changes, however, may impact tourism more than other economic sectors.

Where a tourism economy is built on environmental attractions, there are special concerns. These tourism places are primarily concerned about changes in their natural resource attractions. The biggest threat (or vulnerability) is the inability to bring tourists to the attractions. This can occur from either:

• the loss of access to a natural resource attraction, including the loss of the attraction itself; or

• a loss of access to tourist source areas, so that tourists cannot get to the tourism place.

From the supply side, tourism is an economic activity and both loss scenarios fundamentally impact the financial viability of the industry. Financial concerns serve as the bottom line for most tourism destination decision making because if tourism activities are not economically worthwhile, then it is likely that the tourism system will either completely collapse or transform into a lower-level form, both of which could be considered undesirable states.

Understanding how to maintain tourism activities, and a tourism community's overall quality of life, at a desirable level is generally what the study of tourism resilience is all about. Resilience is generally defined as how a system responds without succumbing to external drivers pressuring it to change (Folke 2016). Responses include resistance (sometimes referred to as ‘resilience’), adaptation and transformation. Social-ecological resilience theory applies a systems approach understanding to how communities as integrated social and environment entities respond to change. Systems exist in a nested hierarchy of larger systems and smaller subsystems, known as a ‘panarchy’ (Gunderson & Holling, 2002; Allen et al., 2014). A tourism economy, for example, would be a subsystem of a larger local or regional economy. In reality, all systems are subsets of the global world panarchy system. Within this global panarchy, systems may be defined in different ways, depending on the focus of a research question. In addition to the overall tourism economy system of a destination (place or region), some of the key systems that tourism researchers tend to focus on include:

• the system of tourist attractions;

• the system of tourism infrastructure and workforce (which may be further subdivided into accommodations, food, transportation and travel services);

• the system of tourist markets (tourist origins and types of tourists);

• the system of drivers of change that impact the tourism economy (all the above); and

• a tourism community system (the larger community that a tourism economy is a part of).

Each of these defines a different system that is being impacted by different external pressures and is responding in a different way. They are all, however, legitimate topics within the study of tourism resilience.

Human- and nature-based change

The focus of this book is on how tourism places respond, adapt, change and sometimes transform (or not) in relation to changes in their environmental context. Sometimes these changes are primarily nature-driven, with tourism places being forced to respond to them. At other times the changes are mostly human-driven under social policies that modify natural environments to better exploit their resource potential. These two scenarios, however, are extremes on a continuum of human–environment interactions that is far less bifurcated than it may sometimes appear. What seems to start out as a human-driven or nature-driven event or process will quickly evolve into a dialectical discourse as mostly human systems respond to natural processes, and, in turn, mostly natural systems respond to human actions.

The world is a social-ecological system in which separations of nature- and human-driven changes are ontologically difficult to make (Wight, 2005). Humans, animals, plants, soils, water bodies and land masses are all open subsystems that interact and influence each other within an all-encompassing global system. Humans influence climate systems, but so does plant and ocean activity. Conversely, climates (as distinct from weather events) influence human settlement by defining the soils and types of organism and animals that are best adapted to an environment. It is important to recognize that these system relationships are deep and complex, even when, from a human perspective, it is more convenient to generalize the sources of change as being human-driven or nature-driven in their character. Disease epidemics, whether impacting humans or animals (e.g. the H5N1 avian bird flu), are an example of a crisis event that is difficult to categorize into simple human or environmental processes.

All three of the scenarios described here (human-driven, nature-driven, and nature–human discourse) are considered in the chapters of this book, through studies of community and tourism resilience responses to shifting environmental contexts. Nature-driven change is primarily seen in chapters related to climate change (which is a slow change process: Chapters 8, 9 and 16) and those discussing preparation and responses to natural hazard disaster events (mostly earthquakes, a very fast change process: Chapters 11, 12, 13 and 14; although Chapters 3 and 6 also cover hazardous weather events). A few chapters address both fast and slow environmental drivers (Chapters 3, 10 and 15).

Discounting the fact that climate change is, by most accounts, largely human-driven in its disaster proportions (Pachauri & Meyer, 2014), other human-caused changes also place significant pressures on natural ecosystems. These are discussed to varying degrees in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Nature-based tourism and climate change
• Part III Disaster events and tourism
• Part IV Indigenous responses to changing environments
• Part V Conclusions
• Index