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.
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