15. Mediterranean Tourism and Climate Change: Identifying Future Demand and Assessing Destinations’ Vulnerability

Including: Albania, Algeria, Croatia, Cyprus, Egypt, France, Greece, Israel, Italy, Lebanon, Libya, Malta, Montenegro, Morocco, Slovenia, Spain, Syria, Tunisia and Turkey.

For comparison: the Americas had 109 million international arrivals (16%), Western Europe had 139.7 million international arrivals (20%) and Asia and the Pacific had 110 million international arrivals (16%) in 2000 (UNWTO 2005).

Not reporting: Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Libya, Malta, Tunisia and Turkey.

The sub-national breakdown of tourist arrivals will be discussed later in the chapter.

This explains why fieldwork developed in the CIRCE project had been focused on seaside tourism and had considered tourism in its global dimension. The whole set of direct and indirect activities that determine the tourism potential and/or that benefit from tourism development (e.g. airport services, taxis, farming and fisheries activities, small groceries, etc.) had thus not been taken into account separately, although all of them will be impacted by a decrease of tourism in case of too constraining climatic conditions. We judged in this research that having an understanding of the general processes at work (considering the tourism territory as a coherent system rather than focusing on the multiple forms of tourism) was a preliminary work. Conclusions should thus have to be completed by in-depth local case studies in order to explain the chain of impacts that lead from a general decrease/reorganisation in tourism flows to an economic catastrophe affecting the whole territory. Considering coastal tourism as the driver of tourism in the Mediterranean also led us to not study the potential consequences of climate change on winter and urban tourism, e.g., although these impacts could be of major importance for mountain territories and cities, respectively. Here again, specific studies should be conducted.

NUTS is a classification system of regions used by countries in the European Union. NUTS 2 is the second level of this system and the best informed in terms of data.

The expression is borrowed from J. Turner and L. Ash (The golden hordes: international tourism and the pleasure periphery, 1976, St. Martin’s Press).

http://​www.​planbleu.​org/​indexUK.​html

For detailed and Mediterranean targeted climate projections, please refer to Part I of the RACCM.

It should be noted here that the consequences of both changes in tourism arrivals levels and the spatial reorganisation of the flows on national economies have been more in-depth analyzed in Chap. 1 (Bosello et al.), notably using the HTM model. Please, refer to this chapter.

The work we developed in the CIRCE project had not consisted in an in-depth analysis of past events and of societies’ reaction to these events, mainly because of a lack of time and access to reliable and exhaustive sources of data. We rather paid attention to the current situation in order to examine what is currently at stake in a context of gradual environmental changes.

Sebkhas are coastal lagoons in desert areas that have been separated from the sea by sand barriers.

For a more detailed presentation of the procedure, see Duvat and Magnan (2009).