A multiple timescales approach to assess urgency in adaptation to climate change with an application to the tourism industry

Dominique Paquin, Ramon de Elía, Stéphanie Bleau, Isabelle Charron, Travis Logan and Sébastien Biner

Environmental Science & Policy, 2016, vol. 63, issue C, 143-150

Abstract: As climate change adaptation is increasingly discussed and becoming a mainstream concept, different types of users are asking themselves if and when they should develop an adaptation strategy, often not knowing where to begin. Climate experts, on the other hand, have access to an enormous amount of data that could be useful to users but often do not know how to translate it into something practical. Both users and experts can be linked through two timescales, the system lifespan and climate vulnerability. While the system lifespan relies on the user’s estimation of his planning timeframe, the climate vulnerability is estimated from climate model projections and observations. We propose a simple tool to relate user and climate expert knowledge by combining the two timescales. To be reliable, the interconnection implies a dialogue to first identify what sensitive climate variable will impact the system and subsequently the extent of the impact. Climate data can then be used to identify, with the use of a simple graph, how sensitive a system is likely to be and help users position themselves about the urgency of adaptation. The concept has been successfully presented and applied to the tourism industry, notably the ski industry, which is showcased in this paper.

Keywords: Climate change; Adaptation; Climate vulnerability; Timescale; Tourism industry (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1462901116302283
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:enscpo:v:63:y:2016:i:c:p:143-150

DOI: 10.1016/j.envsci.2016.05.018

Access Statistics for this article

Environmental Science & Policy is currently edited by M. Beniston

More articles in Environmental Science & Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().