Similarity and Homogeneity of Climate Change in Local Destinations: A Globally Reproducible Approach from Slovakia

In terms of climate change, while tourism’s natural resources may be considered climate vulnerable, a large part of tourism’s primary industries are high carbon consumers. With the growth of worldwide efforts to adopt climate resilience actions across all industries, Destination Management Organizations could become focal points for raising awareness and leadership among local tourism stakeholders. The manuscript communicates a simple, reproducible approach to observing and analyzing climate change at a high territorial granularity to empower local destinations with the capability to disseminate quantifiable information about past, current, and future climate projections. In relation to Slovakia’s 39 local destinations, the approach utilizes six sub-sets of the latest high-resolution Köppen–Geiger climate classification grid data. The main climate categories’ similarity for local destinations was measured across six periods through the Pearson Correlation Coefficient of Pairwise Euclidean Distances between the linkage matrices of hierarchical clusters adopting Ward’s Linkage Method. The Shannon Entropy Analysis was adopted for the quantification of the homogeneity of the DMOs’ main climate categories, and Weighted Variance Analysis was adopted to identify the main climate categories’ weight fluctuations. The current results indicate not only a major shift from destination climates classified as cold to temperate, but also a transformation to more heterogeneous climates in the future.