Socio-Economic Impact of Global Change Scenarions on Winter and Summer Tourism in Austria

It is a well known fact, that out of all industrialised nations, Austria earns the highest share of GDP/capita in its tourism sector. More than any other developed economies, the Austrian highly depends on tourism and is vulnerable to changes of this variable, as they are expected to occur in the context of Global Climate Change. Another well researched fact is the increasing importance of winter tourism compared to summer tourism, both in terms of overnight stays as well as income generated. What empirical economic researchers can contribute to complete the picture is the experience, what an enormous impact varying snow conditions before Christmas can have on the respective economic forecasts for that season, but also on employment figures of the entire year. Given these facts of obviously high economic vulnerability of the Austrian economy to demand shocks arising from weather and climate variability it is surprising that no systematic research efforts have been carried out so far in this field, although often demanded by policy-makers. All that is available by now are rough predictions in the change of overnight stays for some individual tourism regions. What is lacking completely is an exact (quantitative) evaluation of socio-economic vulnerability on a regional scale that includes both, the analysis of the predicted climate change as well as the vulnerability of the regional economy to such changes. The proposed project therefore aims to derive on the one hand realistic regional scenarios from GCM-models and on the other hand to investigate how the associated demand shocks impact the vulnerable tourism sector directly, but as well how they affect other related sectors, whose input-output relationships with tourism should be assessed rigorously, and be quantified on a regional scale. To reach these research goals a number of communities at risk will be analysed concerning their vulnerability to Climate Change. Main research questions hereby are which factors determine the vulnerability of these communities and how the socioeconomic system can reduce its vulnerability to Climate Change by becoming less dependent on changing climate conditions. Closely related to this analysis is the search for suitable adaptation options, focusing not only on technical measures but on options to enhance the flexibility of the socioeconomic system. The research outcomes should give communities and policy makers valuable information and adequate options for action. The methodology developed in this pilot project has the goal to enable other interested communities to carry out similar studies in the future.