Identifying indicators to measure tourists' views on climate change

Abstract

Climate change is emerging as a factor that will exercise considerable influence over future patterns of tourism demand. Concerns over the carbon cost of long distance air travel for example may begin to have a detrimental impact on long haul travel in the near future. Surprisingly, the tourism literature has largely ignored the issue of climate change with only a handful of papers, a few special issues of journals and several books (e.g. Becken & Hay, 2007; Hall & Higham 2005) focusing on the topic. In the scientific literature the reverse is true as evidenced by the large number of papers consulted in the preparation of the IPCC report (2007). The research reported on in this paper deals with the preliminary findings of a project that is designed to develop a survey based monitoring system. The surveys will be used to identify key indicators that reflect changing consumer perceptions of climate change and travel. The results are based on the first of a series of surveys to be conducted in Cairns at yearly intervals. Results of the first survey indicate that the majority of consumers have yet to adopt behaviours that reflect concern about climate change. The resultsalso identify potential candidates for climate change indicators that may be used to track shifts in consumer’s concerns about climate change.