Vulnerability and Resilience Assessment of coastal Tourism Destinations to Climate Change: developing and Applying the Coastourd index to Balneário Camboriú – Brazil.

Abstract

Tourism has been one of the greatest social phenomena of the current century. Almost 1.5 billion international visitors travelled around the world in 2019. However, climate change impacts have been widely recognized as a threat for tourism because several tourism activities rely on climate and nature-based resources such as ski tourism, ecotourism, and beach tourism. Climate projections expect that extreme natural events will increase in frequency and intensity, triggering flash floods, landslides, blown belongings, as well as water shortages. These events negatively affect coastal destinations by inundating and eroding beaches, reducing attractiveness for beachgoers because of sequential days of rainfall, decreasing the spatial area for sunbathing, and causing many other impacts. Several studies have assessed vulnerability and resilience of communities and their settlements by addressing specific components of the tourism system such as economic, mostly applying qualitative methods. Only a few studies analyse in a broader perspective, whereby the approach looks at the whole tourism system rather than specific components, but they lack the quantitative focus. In this context, this thesis

aims to develop a generic and novel framework that combines qualitative- quantitative approaches to create an index to assess the vulnerability and

resilience of coastal tourist destinations to climate change at a destination level, focusing on the whole tourism system. The method consisted of a comparative analysis of several frameworks to find the most suitable one to guide the creation of the assessment tool. As a result, 55 indicators have been suggested to compound the nine dimensions of the Coastourd Index. To validate the tool, the index was applied in the Brazilian destination of Balneário Camboriú, a coastal tourism city that attracts 1.5 million visitors only in the summer. The proposed novel and generic Coastal Tourist Destination Vulnerability and Resilience Index to Climate Change (Coastourd) proved to be a promising tool to help coastal destinations worldwide to map out the factors that cause vulnerability (constraints) and increase resilience (opportunities) in the face of a changing climate.