Climate Change and the Austrian Tourism Sector: Impacts, Adaptation and Macroeconomic Spillover Effects

Even if all greenhouse gas emissions stopped at once, temperatures are predicted to continue rising due to the inertia of the climate system. As skiing tourism in the Austrian Alps is highly climate sensitive, higher temperature and changed precipitation patterns require increased artificial snow making. However, spa and urban tourism rely less on climatic conditions and may benefit from a shift in demand. In this paper, we assess the different climate change impacts and adaptation options for the Austrian tourism sector up to 2050 by taking account of macroeconomic feedback effects. We find in each of the climate scenarios negative effects on demand in all tourism region types. For the summer season, the extent of potential climate change impacts are found to be smaller and the impact direction to be less clear. Due to macroeconomic feedback effects, also non-tourism sectors are affected, but while until 2020 negative spillover effects emerge due to reduced demand from tourism sectors, the effect becomes positive until 2040. Appropriate adaptation measures may counteract a substantial fraction of climate change impacts, but this increases production costs, especially for artificial snow making. In particular, adaptation leads to price increases in the “focus on winter tourism” region for all climatic scenarios in 2020. In contrast, adaptation in the other tourism region types may lead to price decreases due to higher cost savings from reduced heating and reduced relative prices from other inputs. See above See above