تجزیه و تحلیل تعادل عمومی از اثرات تغییرات آب و هوایی در گردشگری

This paper studies the economic implications of climate-change-induced variations in tourism demand, using a world CGE model. The model is first re-calibrated at some future years, obtaining hypothetical benchmark equilibria, which are subsequently perturbed by shocks, simulating the effects of climate change. We portray the impact of climate change on tourism by means of two sets of shocks, occurring simultaneously. The first set of shocks translate predicted variations in tourist flows into changes of consumption preferences for domestically produced goods. The second set reallocate income across world regions, simulating the effect of higher or lower tourists’ expenditure. Our analysis highlights that variations in tourist flows will affect regional economies in a way that is directly related to the sign and magnitude of flow variations. At a global scale, climate change will ultimately lead to a welfare loss, unevenly spread across regions.

Climate plays an obvious role in tourist destination choice. The majority of tourists spend their holidays lazing in the sun, a sun that should be pleasant but not too hot. The Mediterranean particularly profits from this, being close to the main holiday-makers of Europe's wealthy, but cool and rainy Northwest. Climate change would alter that, as tourists are particularly footloose. The currently popular holiday destinations may become too hot, and destinations that are currently too cool would see a surge in their popularity. This could have a major impact on some economies. About 10% of world GDP is now spent on recreation and tourism. Climate change will probably not affect the amount of money spent but rather where it is spent. Revenues from tourism are a major factor in some economies, however, and seeing only part of that money move elsewhere may be problematic. This paper studies the economic implications of climate-change-induced changes in tourism demand. The literature on tourist destination choice used to be largely silent on climate (Crouch, 1995; Witt and Witt, 1995), perhaps because climate was deemed to be obvious or beyond control of managers and perhaps because climate was seen to be constant. Recently, however, an increasing number of studies have looked at the effects of climate change on the behaviour of tourists from a particular origin or on the attractiveness of a particular holiday destination. Few of these studies look at the simultaneous changes of supply and demand at many locations. In fact, few of these studies look at all at economic aspects, the main exception being Maddison (2001), Lise and Tol (2002) and Hamilton (2003) who estimate the changes in demand of British, Dutch and German tourists, respectively. Hamilton et al. (2004) do look at the supply and demand for all countries, but their model is restricted to tourist numbers. This paper tries to fill this gap in the literature. We study climate-change-induced variations in the demand for and the supply of tourism services. We go beyond a partial equilibrium analysis of the tourism market, however, and also add the general equilibrium effects. In this manner, we get a comprehensive estimate of the redistribution of income as a result of the expected redistribution of tourists due to climate change. The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 presents our estimates of changes in international tourist flows. Section 3 outlines the general equilibrium model used in this analysis. Section 4 illustrates how tourism is included in this model. Section 5 discusses the basic tourism data. Section 6 shows the results of our climate change supposition and Section 7 offers a conclusion. An Appendix A describes the general equilibrium model structure and its main assumptions.

Climate change will affect many aspects of our lives, and holiday habits are among the ones most sensitive to variations in climate. This implies that a very important service sector, the tourism industry, will be directly affected, and this may have important economic consequences. This paper is a first attempt at evaluating these impacts within a general equilibrium framework, and establishes two things. Firstly, we show that tourism has impacts throughout the economy. This implies that economic studies, focusing on the tourism industry only, miss important effects. Secondly, we estimate the economy-wide impacts of changes in international tourism induced by climate change. Impacts on domestic demand and household income spread to the rest of the economy through substitution with other goods and services, and through induced effects on primary factors demand and prices. Also, changes in the rate of return of capital influence investment flows, which affects income and welfare. Despite the crude resolution of our analysis, which hides many climate-change-induced shifts in tourist destination choices, we find that climate change may affect GDP by −0.3% to +0.5% in 2050. Economic impact estimates of climate change are generally in the order of −1% to +2% of GDP for a warming associated with a doubling of the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (Tol, 2002), which is typically put at a later date than 2050. As these studies exclude tourism, this implies that regional economic impacts may have been underestimated by more than 20%. The global economic impact of a climate-change-induced change in tourism is quite small, and approximately zero in 2010. In 2050, climate change will ultimately lead to a non-negligible global loss. Net losers are Western Europe, energy exporting countries, and the rest of the world. The Mediterranean, currently the world's prime tourism destination, would become substantially less attractive to tourists. The “Rest of the World” region contains the Caribbean, the second most popular destination, which would also become too hot to be pleasant. The “Rest of the World” also comprises tropical countries, which are not so popular today and would become even less popular under global warming. Energy exporting countries lose out because energy demand falls. China and India are hardly affected. North America, Australasia, Japan, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union are positively affected by climate change. This study has a number of limitations, each of which implies substantial research beyond the current paper. We already mentioned the coarse spatial disaggregation of the CGE model. In particular, finer disaggregation could highlight that climate impacts in Europe will be very different between northern countries and southern countries. We only consider the direct effects of climate change on tourism. We ignore the effects of sea level rise, which may erode beaches or at least require substantial beach nourishment, and which may submerge entire islands, particularly popular atolls (Bosello et al., 2004). In the aggregate, we likely underestimated the costs of climate change on tourism. Disaggregate effects may be more subtle. Remaining atolls may be able to extract a scarcity rent, perhaps even witness a temporary surge in popularity under the cynical slogan “come visit before it is too late”. We also overlooked other indirect effects of climate change, such as those on the water cycle, perhaps misrepresenting ski-tourism, and those on the spread of diseases (Bosello, Lazzarin, Roson, & Tol, 2005), perhaps further deterring tourists. On the economic side, the structure of the CGE does not allow us to estimate the effects of tourism travel, but only the effects of tourism expenditure in the destination country. Finally, our exercise is based on a rather ad hoc scenario, in which all climate change effects occur suddenly and unexpectedly in a given reference year. In reality, climate change and its impacts are phenomena, which evolve over time, and so do the expectations and the adaptive behaviour of economic agents. All these issues are deferred to future research. Such research is worthwhile. We show that there is a substantial bias in previous studies of the economic impacts of climate change, and therewith a bias in the recommendations of cost–benefit analyses on greenhouse gas emission reduction. We also show that the economic ramifications of climate-change-induced tourism shifts are substantial.