Tourism Resilience and Adaptation to Environmental Change : Definitions and Frameworks

Resilience lies at the core of understanding the adaptive capacity of people and places in complex socio-environmental systems. Tourism Resilience and Adaptation to Environmental Change draws on original empirical and theoretical insights to explore how tourism communities and economies respond to environmental change from a resilience perspective. Contributions include a range of tourism contexts from coastal to mountain, urban to remote; and a variety of cases that emphasize both fast and slow change. This timely and significant work will appeal to those working in tourism studies, tourism management, environmental geography and environmental sciences.

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.