1163 | 138 | How most visited Spanish Mediterranean coast destinations are facing climate change? The road map of political, social and environmental dimensions and policy coherence | Sandra Ricart (1,2), Carmen Mínguez (3)
Climate change is causing the weather to get more extreme, demanding policy actions to mitigate their impacts, particularly at the local scale. Cities are leading climate change adaptation and mitigation actors, reflecting a shift towards a more bottom-up approach to climate action and an opportunity to reinforce urban policymakers’ role in implementing climate policies. Understanding local-level responses to change is crucial to increase the tourism industry’s resilience and policymakers’ capacity to be responsive to change. However, there is limited attention to the coverage of climate change actions in urban planning adaptation plans and, more specifically, to the relevance of tourism’s role and actions. Therefore, to address this gap, it is sine-qua-non to assess and analyse the content of the adaptation strategies and plans from a tourism industry’s perspective. This contribution analyses to what extent tourism activity is considered in the Spanish National Plan for Adaptation to Climate Change 2021-2030 (PNACC), how the tourism industry’s adaptive capacity is addressed by accounting for a political, social and environmental dimension, and the level of policy coherence in cities’ adaptation strategies. To this end, we evaluate the current adaptation plans of the most visited tourist cities on the Spanish Mediterranean coast. The findings reported that most plans apply a multi-focal adaptation strategy without explicitly focusing on the tourism industry. Technological (water and energy savings), hard (green spaces, renewable energy sources) and soft (awareness campaigns) adaptation measures are combined to increase cities’ resilience. Interestingly, the bottom-up approach provides background from citizens’ perspectives, sometimes including tourists as end-users. Likewise, the policy coherence analysis confirms that tourism-related measures are explicitly or implicitly mentioned, and their implementation is supported by funding and follow-up strategies.
Sandra Ricart (1,2), Carmen Mínguez (3)
(1) Water and Territory research group, Interuniversity Institute of Geography, University of Alicante, (2) Environmental Intelligence for Global Change Lab, Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano, (3) Tourism, heritage and development research group, Department of Geography, Complutense University of Madrid
ID Abstract: 138