Kaarina Tervo-Kankare

Christmas Tourists’ Perceptions to Climate Change in Rovaniemi, Finland

Abstract Rovaniemi in Finnish Lapland is the self-proclaimed ‘official home of Santa Claus.’ However, in recent years, after several warm and snowless season starts, Christmas tourism businesses have expressed concern about the future of the regions winter tourism industry. This paper examines the challenges of winter tourism operators to adapt to changing environmental conditions by surveying the responses of tourists to potential changes in winter conditions. In the light of climate change projections, maintaining the attractive image of a snow-covered winter wonderland may become impossible. Results indicate that tourists react negatively to estimated changes and planned adaptation mechanisms. This situation may force tourism entrepreneurs and destination managers to reconsider the consequences of current adaptation strategies and develop new attractions and marketing strategies in order to attract new markets and/or rebrand the destination.

Multidisciplinary and Participatory Approach for Assessing Local Vulnerability of Tourism Industry to Climate Change

Abstract The major part of the attractiveness of Nordic tourism relies on natural resources and features such as the landscape, the flora, the fauna and the four seasons. Lately, it has been predicted that climate change will alter these preconditions of nature-based tourism destinations, which may have severe consequences for the tourism industry. Nevertheless, tourism is also bound to many other societal changes that may influence the economics and the development of peripheral communities dependent on tourism and bring new challenges in maintaining their vitality. For assessing these challenges and potential adaptation measures a multidisciplinary and participatory approach was developed in the EU LIFE+ project VACCIA (Vulnerability Assessment of ecosystem services for Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation) Action 12: Tourism. The aim of this article is to evaluate this approach for assessing the local vulnerability and adaptation of tourism to the challenges of climate change in two tourism municipalities of Northern Finland.

Cost of Adaptation to Climate Change in Tourism: Methodological Challenges and Trends for Future Studies in Adaptation

Abstract Considering the increasing impacts of climate change on nature-based winter tourism, this paper examines the challenges related to assessing the costs of adaptation and the emerging cost-related trends. The survey-based case study was conducted in Finnish Lapland and included 70 local entrepreneurs. The questions focused on the costs occurring during the increasingly important Christmas season. The methodological challenges were related to the diversity of the businesses and to potential difficulties in understanding the concept of adaptation. Five cost-related adaptation trends emerged from the study: large investments may decrease the flexibility to respond to changes quickly; small businesses seem to be most affected in terms of financial costs; strong seasonality may affect the ability to absorb the occurred costs; some of the costs could be decreased with effective mitigation; and finally, the occurring benefits can be equally important as costs.

Tourism value chains revisited and applied to rural well-being tourism

ABSTRACT The tourism value chain is a popular and informative topic both in research and in the practice of destination planning and management. This article delivers a critical review of the conceptualizations of value chains in tourism. Two different approaches are identified. First, destination logic addresses the consumption steps and processes of the tourists and comprises the various needs for products and services. Second, supply chain logic, which, from an enterprise perspective, takes into consideration the composition of products and services with supplies from across business sectors, thus recognizes wider contributions to the economics of tourism. With reference to rural well-being tourism, the study outlines strategic alleys within these two logics. In the context of rural well-being tourism, gains for destinations can be achieved from both logics, but local rural areas may increase advantages of tourism with a profounder embracement of supply chain logic.

Costs and benefits of environmental change : tourism industry's responses in Arctic Finland

ABSTRACT Recent research has focused on the impacts of environmental change to tourism. In particular, the perceived costs of climate change have been increasingly studied. However, the relationship between costs and benefits resulting from the changing environmental conditions for the industry has been less examined. This paper identifies the locally observed changes in the natural and socio-economic environments and aims to analyse the financial costs and benefits to tourism businesses in two tourism-dependent communities in northern Finland. The specific focus is on adaptation and adaptive management in a tourist destination scale. Adaption is understood as an investment creating not only implementation costs, but potentially also benefits for tourism operations. Research materials were collected among tourism and tourism-related businesses through 41 semi-structured thematic interviews. Results indicate that the evaluated benefits of environmental change seem to exceed those of costs. This conforms to the on-going discourse of climate change–tourism relations associated with the Arctic region where both awareness and vulnerability to change are considered relatively high but the level of responses, i.e. adaptation, low. These results can help to further identify the most vulnerable sectors in tourism and assist entrepreneurs preparing for environmental and climate change. However, the paper concludes that while global environmental change, with specific adaptive management strategies, may create local short-term direct benefits for the industry, a long-term sustainability of tourism in the Arctic calls for mitigation responses to climate change.

Entrepreneurship in nature-based tourism under a changing climate

This paper presents the findings of an exploratory study examining the values and attitudes of nature-based tourism entrepreneurs in relation to adaptation to climate change. The aim is to focus on tourism stakeholders’ values and ideas about tourism entrepreneurship, which may bring interesting new insights to the tourism and climate change research and support the industry in adaptation and mitigation processes. The data utilised in this paper consists of 19 thematic interviews conducted with nature-based tourism entrepreneurs in Finland between 2009 and 2013. Analysis of the data reveal issues concerning views on entrepreneurship in general, on the independence and individuality of the enterprises, on the roles and responsibilities of different stakeholders in the processes of adaptation and on the attitudes towards innovations and actions in the changing climate. These issues, together with the rate and scale of the change, seem to affect decision-making by the enterprises, but their importance as predictors of action and behavioural intentions needs to be studied more thoroughly. Additionally, more information is required regarding the role of the surrounding social environment as a co-creator of these kinds of values. However, the study supports previous studies on entrepreneurship and its influence on survival and resilience.

Nature-based tourism operators’ responses to changing environment and climate in Uis, Namibia

Abstract Namibia, one of the driest countries in sub-Saharan Africa, has great potential as a nature-based tourism destination, but is also vulnerable to the impacts of global environmental and climate change. In this study the perceptions of tourism businesses in Tsiseb conservancy of the potential impacts of climate change to their operations, and their adaptation plans are analyzed. The results show agreement with recent climate change, but future change is considered to happen with less certainty. The operators believe that climate change impacts tourism industry, but not their own businesses. As a consequence, no concrete adaptation methods have been developed.