Climate Change and Tourism
ATLAS Special Interest Group
Climate Change and Tourism
The coordinator for this Special Interest Group is:
Ioanna Farsari – Dalarna University, Sweden
Climate change has come as a disruption to our usual practices. Social movements and activism such as the Friday school strike has brought it to the everyday discussions. Climate change has challenged also tourism scholars to think outside their local territories to accommodate issues of global social and environmental change (Espiner et al., 2017). In spite of its alarming nature and tourism’s contribution to climate change, tourism remains the sector with the least responsiveness in taking measures to mitigate its carbon footprint (Scott et al., 2016).
The SIG is developed on the understanding of the mutual effects of Tourism on climate change and vice versa, of climate change onto tourism. It acknowledges also the inter and trans disciplinary character of the research on the field and invites contributions from a variety of fields, disciplines, and expertise to encourage the development of shared research agendas which manage to capture the complexity of CC and tourism.
It also acknowledges the accuracy of the matter and the need to relate to stakeholders, policy makers and the wider public in an effort to develop relevant research as well as to disseminate research results to a wider audience for a greater impact. Knowledge sharing and co-creation are deemed important and this SIG aims to offer a fertile ground for the encouragement of collaborations and the development of new, creative, and innovative research.
If you want to contact the SIG coordinator, please fill in the form HERE
If you want to join this SIG, please fill in the form HERE
Annual review of activities 2024
The activities undertaken during this year include:
We have organised the special track in 2023 Annual conference in Austria, with the theme “Quality of life, wellbeing, climate change: Bridging the theory-action gap”. Track Convenors: Ioanna Farsari, Dalarna University, Sweden and Harald A. Friedl, FH JOANNEUM, Austria.
Twelve papers were presented in the special track covering a wide variety of topics such as green mobility; Empowerment of local communities and local food production; Mimicking nature to get inspiration and creativity; Mobility, transport and alternative fuels; Alternative energy sources to green transitions and the locals discourses around those; Modeling and forecasting; Adaptation strategies of both tourists and destination.
During that conference we had also our annual meeting, which was hybrid. During the meeting we discussed mainly the academic flying project and how should we proceed. A number of members discussed their lack of time to put into it. Discussed also possible directions for it. We concluded that we can offer maybe some master thesis and see different approaches on how the topic can be explored. We will discuss the following up on this activity on our next annual meeting in Breda.
During this year, following our goal to collaborate with other SIGs we are planning a special track for ATLAS 2024 annual conference together with the SIG on mobilities. We have formulated and send out the call and have reviewed the abstracts. Discussions are going on around publication opportunities.
Following also the stream of academic flying, Ioanna had an online meeting with Sal Lampkin from Massey University NZ. The purpose was to connect to other networks (as one of the identified activities for that year) and see how they are working on the matter. Ioanna will report on it more during the annual meeting in Breda.
As another action, following up on academic flying, Ioanna participated in the meetings and is following up on a network of Swedish universities for the climate – working group of business trips (in higher education institutes). Ioanna will report more on it during the annual meeting.
During this year, we saw also the publication of a research note based on our first special track from 2021 “Climate change and tourism: scholars’ reflections on transformative research” co-authored by Ioanna Farsari, Martine Bakker &Liliana Carvalho